Community Survey on Tool Use and UI/UX Stuff

ellisonbg · April 30, 2019, 5:12am

Also relevant for UX research with JupyterLab:

JupyterLab telemetry extension

opened 05:04AM - 30 Apr 19 UTC

## Background For the past ~2 years we have had a number of conversations abo…ut building a telemetry system for JupyterLab. By a telemetry system, we mean a system for collecting data about what actions users are performing in JupyterLab, how they are taking those actions (mouse, keyboard shortcut, button), and when. Telemetry data serves a number of purposes for organizations deploying Jupyter: i) operational and security monitoring, ii) intrusion detection, iii) compliance auditing, and iv) a-posteriori analysis of the platform’s usage and design–i.e. as a UX research tool. ## Tenets There are certainly ethical and legal questions around telemetry systems. To address these, I propose the following tenets of the telemetry system: * **Data protection by design and default.** JupyterLab and its telemetry system should come with builtin tools that enable safe and secure deployments with all types of data. See [Art. 25 of GDPR](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-25-gdpr/) for details about this tenet. * **Make it easy to do the right things by default.** There are many ways to collect and use telemetry data that are illegal and/or irresponsible. JupyterLab's telemetry system should encode best practices and make it easy for operators to be responsible and comply with relevant laws. * **Choice in balancing tradeoffs.** There are two types of data JupyterLab: 1) the actual datasets users are working with in notebooks, and 2) telemetry data about the Jupyter users. At times, protecting these two types of data at the same time will require tradeoffs. For example, if a deployment is doing research with sensitive HIPAA or FERPA data, the operators need to closely monitor every action taken by its researchers using JupyterLab to ensure the sensitive data is used appropriately. At the same time, in some jurisdictions (EU) Jupyter users may be protected by local laws (GDPR) about what telemetry data can be recorded, how it can be used, the terms of that usage. * **Don't ignore the need for telemetry**. Organizations deploying Jupyter need to collect telemetry for a range of purposes. If we ignore this need, they will route around the project, with potential legal and ethical complications. By being proactive, we can establish best practices and guardrails. ## Current status @ian-r-rose has created an exploratory JupyterLab telemetry extensions here: https://github.com/ian-r-rose/jupyterlab-telemetry This extension shows some of the major pieces requires: * Hooks into JupyterLab's command system to record telemetry data when commands are run. * Metadata added to the points in the code base where commands are triggered to indicate how they are triggered (mouse, keyboard, click, menu, etc.). * Some sort of API/Interface for sending telemetry to an appropriate data store. * Interfaces and UI components pertaining to the user experience of telemetry. This includes enabling users to approve or revoke permission to collect telemetry data, displaying telemetry related statuses, inspect and download it, etc. It may also make sense to build differential privacy into our telemetry collection code to protect users. This isn't appropriate for all deployments, but in many cases it would be extremely helpful. ## Next steps @Zsailer and @jaipreet-s have cycles in the coming months to work on the telemetry system. I propose that we create a new repo in the JupyterLab org for this work, possibly seeding it with Ian's previous work. We would love to see others contributing to this work as well–especially folks from organizations that 1) need to collect telemetry and 2) are experienced with doing so in a responsible and legal manner. I will also post on the discourse channel to let more people know about this. Full disclosure - I work for AWS now so it is useful to sync on how AWS think about user data. Customer data privacy and protection is a top priority–more details can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/

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Community Survey on Tool Use and UI/UX Stuff

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