Comment by gpm
1 day ago
I mean, you've labelled one big one already with the GDPR covering a significant fraction of the world - and unlike your average analytics "username and email address" sounds unquestionably identifying/personal information.
Where I live I think this would violate PIPEDA, the Canadian privacy law that covers all business that do business in any Canadian province/territory other than BC/Alberta/Quebec (which all have similar laws).
There's generally no exception in these for "open source devtools" - laws are typically still laws even if release something for free. The Canadian version (though I don't think the GDPR does) has an exception for entirely non-commercial organizations, but Bloop AI appears to be a commercial organization so it wouldn't apply. It also contains an exception for business contact information - but as I understand it that is not interpreted broadly enough to cover random developers email addresses just because they happen to be used for a potentially personal github account.
Disclaimer: Not a lawyer. You should probably consult a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction (i.e. all of them) if it actually matters to you.
> GDPR covering a significant fraction of the world
> privacy law that covers all business that do business in any Canadian province
A random group of people uploaded free software source code and said 'hey world, try this out'. I wish the GDPR and the PIPEDA the best of luck in keeping people from doing that. (Not to actually defend the telemetry, tbh that's kinda sleezy imo.)
I mean, those are merely the two countries privacy laws I'm most familiar with. The general principal of "no you can't just steal peoples personal information" is not something unique to the ~550 million people the laws I cited cover.
And the laws don't prevent you from uploading "random" software and saying "try this". They prevent you from uploading spyware and saying "try this". Edit: Nor does the Canadian one cover any random group of people, it covers commercial entities, which Bloop AI appears to be.