2019-10-29 UPDATE: The following email is going out to all GitLab users:
Dear GitLab users and customers,
On October 23, we sent an email entitled “Important Updates to our Terms of Service and Telemetry Services” announcing upcoming changes. Based on considerable feedback from our customers, users, and the broader community, we reversed course the next day and removed those changes before they went into effect. Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service. This clearly struck a nerve with our community and I apologize for this mistake.
So, what happened? In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology. Clearly, our evaluation and communication processes for rolling out a change like this were lacking and we need to improve those processes. But that’s not the main thing we did wrong.
Our main mistake was that we did not live up to our own core value of collaboration by including our users, contributors, and customers in the strategy discussion and, for that, I am truly sorry. It shouldn’t have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions, first versus third-party tracking, data protection, security, deployment flexibility and many other topics, and we should have listened first.
So, where do we go from here? The first step is a retrospective that is happening on October 29 to document what went wrong. We are reaching out to customers who expressed concerns and collecting feedback from users and the wider community. We will put together a new proposal for improving the user experience and share it for feedback. We made a mistake by not collaborating, so now we will take as much time as needed to make sure we get this right. You can be part of the collaboration by posting comments in this issue. If you are a customer, you may also reach out to your GitLab representative if you have additional feedback.
I am glad you hold GitLab to a higher standard. If we are going to be transparent and collaborative, we need to do it consistently and learn from our mistakes.
Sincerely,
Sid Sijbrandij
Co-Founder and CEO
GitLab
2019-10-24 UPDATE: We’ve heard your concerns and questions and have rolled back any changes to our Terms of Service. We’re going to process the feedback and rethink our approach. We will not activate user level product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan. We will make sure to communicate our proposed changes prior to any changes to GitLab.com or self-managed instances, and give sufficient time for people to provide feedback for a new proposal. We’ll work in this issue.
Update 10/25: We have opened this issue for further discussion on this topic. Please direct your feedback there: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com#5672
Update 10/24/19:
We’ve heard your concerns and questions and have rolled back any changes to our Terms of Service. We’re going to process the feedback and rethink our approach. We will not activate user level product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan. We will make sure to communicate our proposed changes prior to any changes to GitLab.com or self-managed instances, and give sufficient time for people to provide feedback for a new proposal. We’ll work in this issue.
Here’s an MR updating our blog post accordingly: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!33289 (diffs, comment 235139590)
Terms of Service Update
Periodically GitLab updates Terms of Service and communicates these updates to our product users. Here is a link to our Terms of Service.
Why are we implementing telemetry?
The reason we are using telemetry is for our Product Managers to analyze usage data to make GitLab a better product. Most SaaS products that are used today use telemetry for this reason, and it benefits users by enabling a better product experience.
Telemetry Specific Changes
Product
Impacts
Community Edition (CE)
No changes to CE. Telemetry will not be added.
GitLab.com (all tiers)
Yes, Javascript snippets for both Pendo and Snowplow will be added to GitLab.com and Do Not Track will be honored for users who wish to opt-out.
Enterprise Edition (EE)
No current changes. We are not adding telemetry services to EE at this time.
GitLab.com (GitLab’s SaaS offering) will now include additional Javascript snippets (both open source and proprietary) that will interact with both GitLab and third-party SaaS telemetry services (we will be using Pendo and Snowplow).
We will disclose all such usage in our privacy policy, as well as what we are using the data for. We will also ensure that any third-party telemetry service we use will have data protection standards at least as strong as GitLab, and will aim for SOC2 compliance (Pendo is SOC2 compliant).
Important for GitLab Enterprise Edition (Self-managed) Customers:
We are not adding Pendo or Snowplow JS snippets to self-hosted versions at this time. We are carefully considering the appropriate opt-out functionality for telemetry that will work best for our customers, and we will clearly communicate to those customers when any change is made.
What to do if I don’t want to share my product usage data with a 3rd party service?
For GitLab.com:
In order to service the needs of GitLab.com users who do not want to be tracked, GitLab.com will honor the Do Not Track (DNT) mechanism in web browsers.
This means that, if you turn on Do Not Track in your browser, GitLab will not load the JavaScript snippet. The only downside to this is that users may also not get the benefit of in-app messaging or guides that some third-party telemetry tools have that would require the JavaScript snippet.
For GitLab CE:
GitLab CE will continue to be free software with no changes. If you want to install your own instance of GitLab without proprietary software, GitLab CE remains available, as it is licensed under the MIT License. Many open-source software projects use GitLab CE for their SCM and CI needs, and nothing is changing with CE.
Link to GitLab CE – https://about.gitlab.com/install/?version=ce
