It's pretty much industry standard for all consumer products to deliver metrics back to home base. Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. While I understand the argument that we did fine in these products for decades without them, the complexity of the products was also a lot less back then. Finding issues via metrics from the production fleet is an incredible tool and anyone who's deployed software to a server probably understands this.

I'd rather focus on standardizing a transparent and privacy safe way to gather these metrics. Consumers would know what metrics are collected and there would be guarantees that privacy is kept. There are ways to accomplish this today.

Providing a way to disable metrics is never going to be sufficient for anyone other than a power user.

Not sure how I feel about the HTTPS/TLS related bits. These days anything I write in Go uses plain HTTP, and the TLS is done by a reverse proxy of some variety that does some other stuff with the traffic too including security headers, routing for different paths to different services, etc. I never run a go web application "bare", public facing, and manually supplying cert files.

Just throwing in my left handed anecdote here: the bottom of my hand was always covered in pencil graphite when I was in school because your hand drags over what you've been writing from left -> right. Also ring binders were a pain in the ass (your hand is blocked at the left margin lol)

I use Gary Bernhardt's (non)-method, quoted here:

IMO you don't need a special tool to manage your home directory / dotfiles. Git is the tool. Your home directory is a repo with a .git directory like any other repo. No other tools; no symlinks; nothing else. Commit what you want and gitignore the rest. I've done this since 2008.

Never had a problem with it.

Once I coughed, sneezed, and farted at the same time. Very painful.