This is set up for the same fate as DNT in browsers. Collecting all the "do not track" env vars into a single "do_not_track.env" file, however, may not be a bad idea...

I was surprised how hard it was to stop the Python transformers library from phoning home to Hugging Face. I set HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1, and when I called Wav2Vec2CTCTokenizer.from_pretrained I explicitly passed local_files_only=True, but still I got got a warning about not having a valid HF_TOKEN. It wasn't until I stumbled upon HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1 that I'm somewhat confident that I'm not making outgoing connections to HF every time I load a wav2vec2 model from disk.

I wouldn't have realized this was happening at all if it weren't for the obnoxious HF_TOKEN warning.

Looks like a helpful honeypot! Any tool that will public announce support for this spec is a tool I know to avoid because it collects telemetry without explicit opt-in in the first place.

I thought it would be a sh script to automatically set the flags for all known do not track env vars.

Given the URL and list of different opt-outs I thought this was going to be a shell script to set all these for you. In fact, I've just had an idea...

The most useful part of this page is the list of optout commands to stick in my shellrc.

Is anyone maintaining a more complete list of those?

> Many CLI tools, SDKs, and frameworks collect telemetry data by default.

Any of those are using a dark pattern and before exploring new ways to opt out you should look for and spend your energy on an alternative which respects your freedoms upfront.

It worked so well on the browser already

Also this, we disable it when building or deploying apps in DollarDeploy

export SEMGREP_SEND_METRICS=off export COLLECT_LEARNINGS_OPT_OUT=true export STORYBOOK_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 export NEXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export SLS_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export SLS_NOTIFICATIONS_MODE=off export DISABLE_OPENCOLLECTIVE=true export NPM_CONFIG_UPDATE_NOTIFIER=false

It's probably easier to run your own DNS and blacklist the offending domains. There are good blacklists with millions of telemetry domains, e.g. https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists.

He’s better off vibecoding an include.sh that sets all the known do not track env vars for you.

Honest question, what's the problem with crash dumps that include no personal info? They just help make the software less buggy. I also don't see an issue with anonymized usage patterns (this feature was used X times this month, this one Y times, etc).

Can someone expound on what they see as a problem?

Default opt-in tracking should be illegal and enforced with such fines and prison sentences, that companies wouldn't even dare to have anything remotely capable of tracking in the runtime.

Unfortunately big corporations can always find away to make regulators see no problem.

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