Privacy or a Better Service?

When you receive an email in plaintext from the CEO of a major company, your first thought is that it’s a spam email:

But, this one wasn’t. It was from GitLab, and it was related to their update which tracked user activity:

GitLab — now valued at $2.7 billion — provides workflow tools which allow a team to work together on shared code, production plans, and documents. In the promotion of their new service they outline:

“GitLab has a lot of features, and a lot of users, and it is time that we use telemetry to get the data we need for our product managers to improve the experience”

But the weight of opinion was that this breached the rights to privacy, and where the user should not be tracked in their activities. The integration involved users signing up to the new tracking service, and who would be blocked until their did so. Although GitLab outlined that it would protect user data with…