Comment by pnw_throwaway
16 hours ago
The problem with opt-in telemetry is that 95% of users are sick and tired of being spied on with every little thing they do.
16 hours ago
The problem with opt-in telemetry is that 95% of users are sick and tired of being spied on with every little thing they do.
If they really were they would turn it off. And stop using Gmail and Android.
The overwhelming majority of people don't care about digital privacy because the cost is opaque to them.
Also, telemetry when done right isn't "spying". Again, it is anonymized and used to see, for example, where the hot paths and paper cuts in applications are.
i think that in a free society, you should be able to sell the product you want to sell. but, you should give information of what you are selling to the customer.
if it has telemetry, then it is a tool the customer buys, that also has the function of listening and reporting to others, how it is being used.
you want to sell it - no problem. but tell the customer, "look, this is bugged, and it's going to tell me what you are doing. but it's a great product." anything with opt-out telemetry needs a big version of that warning on the top of the page.
personally i am not a buyer. but that's my preference.
And how would I know if you did it right or not?
Telemetry (if it’s truly telemetry) is nowhere close to “tracking”. People conflate the two all the time. One can provide useful, anonymous metrics (e.g. “user enabled feature X”) without doing anything but incrementing the counter for “feature X”.
The “Firefox Problem” is that all the power users disable telemetry, so all the “cool” features that power users like (but never get used by “regular people”) get ignored or removed instead of improved because, according to the metrics, “nobody uses them”.
The user doesn't conflate the two, the developers do, and that's why we turn off telemetry, because its damn close to tracking.
Knowing what (vulnerable) version of software a user is using transmitted in the clear was absolutely a part of the NSA monitoring error information from windows crash logs https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/nsa_collects_... - so forgive me if I do not trust the developer to know what makes me unsafe or not.
If you enable telemetry by default I will do my best to never use your product.
As you can see with TikTok / Instagram usage…regular people who are not on HN could not care less about that.