Can we please disable telemetry by default?

[ryana]

I just learned about telemetry being on by default. I'm really shocked by this. Can we have a discussion about changing the default to be off?

[annthurium]

hi @ryana ,

Sorry you were surprised about this!

The telemetry data provides really valuable signals for us as to what is the most useful in our framework and where to invest time in. We do however document how to disable telemetry as this is of course something you can opt out of.

We are transparent about it too. For example, each tutorial has a section on enabling telemetry with an optional cell to run if you want to let us know which tutorial you’re running, and we have a page about it in our docs. We don’t track any PII and we don’t track the content of what you are processing with Haystack.

We would be very open to getting advice as to whether this information was easy for you to find, or whether you have suggestions on where/how to document this further. Thanks for your input.

[ryana]

Thanks for the quick response!

I want to be really careful to not have this pivot into a "how can we document it better" discussion. This is not about the clarity of the documentation. It's about the philosophical position that has been taken in defaulting it to on. I'm sure it has happened elsewhere, but in 20 years of doing this I can't think of another example of a framework I've used where reporting telemetry back is defaulted to on.

What's the best way to get this discussion in front of a lot of people? Should I chat about it on discord or does this forum get perused by a good chunk of folks?

[v3ss0n]

Still it is calling home and it is problem in goverment env where we need airgapped.
It is worse when it create a config in home directory , when we don't have permission to write to home , it just fail to start.
I strongly advice disabling telemetry .