[Haskell-cafe] GHC release series adoption rates

[amindfv at mailbox.org]

On Tue, May 28, 2024 at 09:30:46PM +0100, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:
> [...] In particular, it'd be great to have some telemetry.  Telemetry is a complex
> issue -- but we now have some very well-informed colleagues: the team at
> Scarf.  So maybe we'll get some basic data before long, which would be a
> big step forward.  (We'd expect to be transparent about that too of course!)

Respectfully, "we'd expect to be transparent about that" already feels like a violated promise. I did not know until this email that Haskell.org had engaged a telemetry gateway using "zero-cookie tracking pixels" for "meticulous tracking of visitor patterns" to engage with their "previously anonymous audience"!

(Quotes from https://about.scarf.sh/post/haskell-org-bridging-the-gap-between-language-innovation-and-community-understanding and from the homepage and FAQ.)

I'd expect the primary purpose of a language homepage, language asset distribution, etc. is to provide software to those who would use it. To use tarball distribution to "understand where in the funnel your open source users are," "transforming anonymous downloads, web traffic, and usage into company profiles and journeys," etc. feels like a deep scammy repurposing of our central resource (Haskell.org) for surveillance and marketing purposes.

They explicitly focus on, for example, using IP addresses for "Identifying which companies are using a particular package." And as far as I can tell, this data is going to Scarf the (multimillion dollar, VC-funded) company too. This is bad.

I want to reiterate my deep respect for the project, but jeez - this is not a good path to go down.

Thanks,
Tom