Privacy or a Better Service?

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 strong privacy standards, and in implementing a Do Not Track (DNT) feature, the weight of the community was that this was not a good feature, especially as it tracked within the browser.

Conclusions

There are some companies which track you down and watch your movements on-line —such as Google and Facebook — but companies now must understand that the users have a right to privacy, and not to be tracked for their every movement. We often accept that some companies give us a service for free, and for this we must pay with the loss of privacy, but we should always evaluate the benefits of this, against what is provided. If the cost is too high, we should switch services.