Through a hackernews post I learned that homebrew is sending anonymized usage data to google analytics. I don’t want to get into the discussion whetere that is good or not. homebrew gives the following reasoning:
Homebrew is provided free of charge and run entirely by volunteers in their spare time. As a result, we do not have the resources to do detailed user studies of Homebrew users to decide on how best to design future features and prioritise current work.
which makes sense. If you don’t agree with their policy you should probably support them either through a donation or other contributions.
To opt-out of usage data being sent you can set this variable in your environment:
export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1
Alternatively, this will prevent analytics from ever being sent:
brew analytics off