Let’s be clear: the absolute last thing we wanted was for someone’s code to get synced to our servers without their knowledge.
I don't buy it. The UX was dark-patterned to enable this very thing, and this reads like damage control when it's clear it wouldn't fly under the radar.
If it were the last thing Kite wanted, there would be a big warning that this option uploads your code to their servers. Or some mention of the upload at all. Or it wouldn't be the foundation of Kite's business.
As a third party to this debacle, all I have to go on is the comments people have made, but a few of them have asserted that that language was added later on and some initial versions of this change either outright lacked that warning, or else used styling tricks to make it difficult to notice. I lack the time and/or motivation to go digging through the commit history for that plugin, but maybe someone more enterprising could do so and verify if that warning was always present and presented in such a visible fashion.
It's been in there for quite some time, and there have been a variety of commits that carried some variation of the same "we analyze your code in the cloud" message:
Their entire permissions messaging is encapsulated in the user connecting the presence of the word "enable" in both the description and on the button. That's it.
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I don't buy it. The UX was dark-patterned to enable this very thing, and this reads like damage control when it's clear it wouldn't fly under the radar.
If it were the last thing Kite wanted, there would be a big warning that this option uploads your code to their servers. Or some mention of the upload at all. Or it wouldn't be the foundation of Kite's business.
The image they show in the post shows that they were fairly clearly saying "Where enabled, your code is sent to our cloud":
https://kite.com/static/media/autocomplete-python-flow.690d3...
Sure, it is not exactly hilighted there, but I wouldn't say that they were trying to hide that either.
As a third party to this debacle, all I have to go on is the comments people have made, but a few of them have asserted that that language was added later on and some initial versions of this change either outright lacked that warning, or else used styling tricks to make it difficult to notice. I lack the time and/or motivation to go digging through the commit history for that plugin, but maybe someone more enterprising could do so and verify if that warning was always present and presented in such a visible fashion.
It's been in there for quite some time, and there have been a variety of commits that carried some variation of the same "we analyze your code in the cloud" message:
https://github.com/kiteco/kite-installer/commit/c52c5daa672c...
Taking over the minmap autocompletion projects and adding these features still feels a bit sleazy, but the installer was honest about how it worked.
Their entire permissions messaging is encapsulated in the user connecting the presence of the word "enable" in both the description and on the button. That's it.