User Insights Without User Surveillance: The Clean Insights Approach to Privacy-Respecting Analytics

Open source software teams traditionally reject user-tracking analytics out of ethical concerns. Unfortunately, this means open source developers end up operating without sufficient insight into how their tools are being used, how they could have more impact or be more responsive, and how state surveillance and censorship are evolving to counter their effectiveness and limit their use. Enter: Clean Insights! Clean Insights gives developers a way to plug into a secure, private measurement platform. It is focused on assisting in answering key questions about app usage patterns--not on enabling invasive surveillance of all user habits. Our approach provides programmatic levers to pull to cater to specific use cases and privacy needs. It also provides methods for user interactions that are ultimately empowering instead of alienating. Join us for a workshop to learn how you can collect user data safely and respectfully.