
Etcher tracks user data without consent - aggressman
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/2977
======
GrayShade
Etcher seems to be an USB flasher. The linked issue says that it phones home
on startup, but there's no analysis regarding what it sends. This could be
usage tracking or an update check.

While the reporter is correct that some users don't want this to happen, it
doesn't look that unusual or dangerous. "Secretly spies" is unnecessarily
inflammatory, I would say.

Looking at the GitHub history of the reporter, he seems to be opening quite a
lot of issues like this one (asking projects to stop recommending Etcher or
complaining about Netdata). He's also advertising his own standard for
disabling telemetry across different applications:
[https://consoledonottrack.com/](https://consoledonottrack.com/). That idea
has some merit, maybe, but I don't really like such an aggressive approach.

------
vbezhenar
Any automatic update check would classify as "secretly spying" according to
this report. This is nonsense.

~~~
ajacksified
To be fair, most (possibly all?) software has a "automatically check for
updates?" checkbox, which would solve the author's issue, if it's just an
update check.

------
mdtusz
As others have indicated, this is just an auto-update check.

[https://github.com/balena-
io/etcher/blob/master/lib/gui/etch...](https://github.com/balena-
io/etcher/blob/master/lib/gui/etcher.js)

This makes me very curious as to the motivation behind such an inflammatory
issue report. Does this individual work for a competitor, or have some other
issue with balena?

~~~
GrayShade
Nah, he's been doing that for other projects.

------
aggressman
He also wants removal Etcher from Brew: [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-
cask/pull/73195](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/pull/73195)

