Comment by Sytten

There are two aspects of that:

1) Metrics lead to wrong conclusion. There is software which has extremely rarely used features, I need it once or twice a year only, but the ability is why I use the software to begin with. If metrics get too much attention such things are removed as being unimportant ...

2) a lot of the tracking happening is way too intrusive and intransparent. There are valid use cases, however some large corporations especially, in the last had cases where they collected way too much, including private information, without really giving information about it. That overshadows good cases.

Many products would be much better if they listened to what people are saying on public forums instead of using telemetry. For example, Google Maps has a longstanding bug where it auto-translates all reviews even if they are in a language you speak. If Google cared about user feedback, they could’ve easily fixed it, but no amount of telemetry will tell them this.

Why do you need to collect hardware fingerprint, IMEI, phone number, geolocation, list of nearby wifi access points, list of installed applications, selfie and passport photo when you can simply count how much times a server route was called?

> Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.

Yes, admittedly, the first time you do these things, they're difficult, hard and you have lots to learn. But as you do this more often, build up a knowledge base and learn about your users, you'll gain knowledge and experience you can reuse, and it'll no longer take you weeks or months of investigations to answer "Where should this button go?", you'll base it on what you already know.

> and sending it to the government

It literally is. The network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

The mere act of making a network connection leaks my physical location, the time I'm using my computer, and the fact that I use a particular piece of software. Given enough telemetry endpoints creates a fingerprint unique to me, because it is very unlikely that any other person at the same physical location uses the exact same set of software that I do, almost all of which want to phone home all the goddamn time. It's the metadata that's important here, so payload contents (including encryption) don't even matter.

"You’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move" - that's literally what tracing and telemetry is about.

"Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision." -> your analytics will never show what you didn't measure - it will only show what you already worked on - at best, it's some kind of validator mechanism - not a driver for feature exploration.

This kind of monitoring need to go through the documented data exposure - and it's a sufficient argument for a company to stop using github immediately if they take security seriously.

But I'd add that if you take security seriously you are not on Github anyway.

You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it

the other crowd that pretends otherwise are larping or only have some generic open source project that only a handful of people use or they only update it every 6 years

Telemetry is the previous obvious step to surveillance. Not the telemetry you implement in your own small bus, but at the scale of microsoft, apple, meta… yeah

Yes, but the answer to "how many people clicked that button" is irrelevant if it describes the outside world. This id like concluding something is wrong with umbrellas because none of the users in the desert opened them.

If the questions you have can be answered by simple telemetry you are likely asking the wrong questions. E.g. a confused user will click all the buttons, while one thst efficiently uses your software to solve a very specific problem may always ever press the ssme ones.

The actually interesting questions are all about how your software empowers users to deal with the things they have to deal with. Ideally with as little buttons as possible. And if once a year they need that other button it will be there.

It is very easy to draw the wrong conclusions from telemetry.

> with perfect precision.

Precision isn't accuracy and all that.

> From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move

> it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?”

You don't see the contradiction here?

> Sometimes HN drives me crazy.

You can tell the difference between those who build businesses and those who simply use them.

The reason that feature gets implemented is not because the devs think users will like it ... they know users don't want it, but it drives revenue and pays salaries.

But collecting data and looking for insights doesn't mean you mechanically optimize features, especially user-hostile ones? This is just as, if not more, likely to happen when basing your decisions on what people say they want over what they actually do.

I would say to your point that you can't not spy on me while also spying on me. Maybe just don't?

You could survey a representative sample

That’s what user forums are for.

In principle, yes, I believe it is a form of spying. Not particularly invasive nor harmful, but spying nonetheless.

Logging every page visited is not a technical requirement of serving the requested resource.

You stated that you are blind without analytics, which heavily implies other forms of user research are useless and don’t provide meaningful signal. I don’t think an assumption that you’re not using other methods is that outrageous.

> We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding.

Yeah, sure. How long is that policy gonna last? How does a user even know that that checkbox does anything?

Once you’ve decided to break a social contract it’s not like you can slap a bandaid on it and it’s all okay now.

> I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.

People were building successful businesses long before the Internet.

> You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here.

People in this case are likely extrapolating based on how user data is harvested in the industry at large. So there is bound to be (very likely) some characterization that is unfair to you.

Given modern data aggregation, really data vacuuming, and that software is opaque, it can be really hard to trust anyone with any aggregation of data. They say that they pseudonymize properly. The proof? Trust them bro. Then read yet another news article about how some data aggregation was either sloppily leaked or just a front for selling data.

A natural response to opaque practices by people you don’t trust is a hardline no.

If you have an existing financial relationship with someone it is by definition not a "cold message." People who think they should never, ever be contacted by a company they are paying to use a service of are in the extreme minority. That's "cabin in the woods with no electricity" territory.

True. Some people shouldn't use git if their workflow doesn't beg it.