The consent you can't ask for

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a comfortable story going round about telemetry, and it goes like this. There are two kinds. There’s the creepy kind, the usage data a vendor harvests to work out who you are and what you do, and that kind needs your permission. And there’s the innocent kind, the operational data a service emits so the people running it can keep it up, and that kind is just plumbing, nobody’s business, no permission required. Two neat boxes, and only one of them has a lock on it.

I don’t think the boxes are that neat. And I think a fair few of the people drawing them that way know it.

Because there’s no clean line where operational data stops being personal. A web service’s logs carry IP addresses. Its traces carry the path you walked through the system, the ids of the things you touched, sometimes the very fields you sent. Point at almost any of it and a GDPR lawyer will cheerfully tell you it can be personal data, and that the law doesn’t much care whether you filed it under “analytics” or “observability”. The word you picked to describe the data was never the thing that decided whether it was personal. The data decided that, and a lot of operational data is personal.

So if you can’t hide behind the box marked “just plumbing”, what do you actually do?

Where I’m coming from

I should say up front that I haven’t always been this relaxed about it. I spent a good few years in righteous fury at every tool that phoned home, every “we collect anonymous telemetry to improve the product” I never agreed to. Then I started building the tools, and I needed the data myself: the kind that tells you which features people actually use and which command falls over on first run, the kind that lets you make the next decision with something better than a hunch. And it softened me. Not into thinking it’s fine to take it without asking. Into understanding why everyone wants to.

What the fury left me with, the one thing I’ve never talked myself out of, is being pro-choice. Not pro-collection, not anti. Pro-choice. Any tool I ask another person to run will never quietly opt them into sending me a thing. It asks. On first run it makes its case, says what it wants and why, and lets them say no and mean it. I’ll try hard to win the yes, because the data is genuinely useful and a tool gets better when people share it. But I won’t presume it. The choice is theirs, and the prompt exists so they actually get to make it.

The trouble with a service

Which is a lovely principle right up until you build a web service. Because who, exactly, do you prompt? An API doesn’t have a first run. It has a thousand callers a second, none of them sat at a terminal waiting to tick a box. You can’t show a consent dialog to a webhook. The answer the industry reaches for is “consent is implied by use”, and… maybe. It’s a grey area, full stop. Implied consent is the same hand-wave that gave us the cookie banner, the thing we all click through without reading. I’m not going to stand here and call it clean.

But there’s a version of the principle that survives the grey, and it’s the one I built the framework around. Consent belongs to whoever can actually give it. For a command-line tool, that’s the person running it, so you ask them. For a web service, the person who can give it was never the end user at all, because you can’t reach them. It’s the engineer who deploys the thing. They know what their service collects, who its users are, which law they sit under, whether they owe anyone a privacy notice. They are the one party in the whole chain who can make the call with any of the facts in front of them. So that’s where the choice goes.

Which is why, in go-tool-base, the web-service telemetry is a switch. On or off, the engineer’s hand on it, collecting only what you need to keep the lights on by default. There’s no consent prompt, not because consent stopped mattering, but because there’s nobody in the loop I could ask. The accountability sits with the person who can hold it.

The part I’ll own

I’m pro-choice on telemetry, which is exactly why I built a way to switch it off and a way to force it on. Because for a web service the person holding the choice was never the end user, it’s the engineer who ships it, and “pro-choice” has to mean putting the switch in their hand, not pretending a popup would have meant anything.

That force-it-on part is the bit I’ll answer for. I built a way for a tool author to bypass the first-run prompt entirely and bake the consent in. There’s a real use case behind it, the enterprise tool deployed under a policy where collection is contractual rather than optional. But I also know I’ve handed someone a way to take the choice away, and I did it deliberately. Rightly or wrongly, I made the framework flexible enough to do the wrong thing, and the line I care about is now only as safe as the judgement of whoever picks it up.

That’s the uncomfortable place this lands, and I’ve come to think it’s the true one. A framework can put the choice in the right hands. It cannot make the right choice. I can build the prompt, build the switch, set the defaults to the modest thing, and after that I have to trust the engineer on the other side to use it justly and with some wisdom, because there is nothing further down the stack that makes them. When the blame gets shared out, and it’s always shared, a piece of it has my name on it, for every escape hatch I left in.

I’m at peace with that, mostly. Not because the grey went away, but because the alternative, pretending there’s a clean line and that “operational” means “not your problem”, is the real dodge. I’d rather say it plainly: this data can be personal, the consent is real even when there’s nobody to ask, and the most a tool can do is hand the decision to the person who can make it, and trust them with it.

Gdpr on PHP Boy Scout

The consent you can't ask for

Where I’m coming from

The trouble with a service

The part I’ll own