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Okay, I see your point, but the counter-argument is that opt-in telemetry is practically useless. The whole point of telemetry is to passively monitor the major

by Sacho 9y ago

Okay, I see your point, but the counter-argument is that opt-in telemetry is practically useless. The whole point of telemetry is to passively monitor the majority of users and see how they use the software, what the pain points are, where to focus on, etc. Most of the people who would explicitly opt-in are also likely to make their feelings known through other channels, their voice is already heard on forums, help channels, issue trackers, etc. What you need to know is how the "silent majority" uses your software. Personally, I would prefer developers have this option to improve their products. I am willing to put lots of caveats there: the telemetry gathering should be clearly indicated, it should be transparent, we should have access to the data, and obviously, it should be anonymized as much as possible. I think Microsoft ticks all those boxes in their approach. I also acknowledge that they hadn't done so at the start of the issue, but the situation quickly got muddled up with the opt-in vs opt-out back-and-forth, rather than how well they had implemented their opt-out approach.

inetknght 9y ago
Using telemetry to see how users use software is pointless. It does nothing to actually explain why a user is doing something. So instead you have to have teams of people who try to make, at best, an educated guess about user activity and reasons behind them. If I'm clicking back and forth in a window, why should you assume it has something to do with your software? Yeah it's the most likely culprit in your opinion. But in my opinion I simply accidentally clicked somewhere, brought your window to focus, and went back to what I was doing elsewhere. Or clicked a button and clicked around to figure out how to undo it. I've seen tons of people with ADD-style clicking and typing while they're actually doing something completely irrelevant. It's literally just noise. Why do you need to try to interpret it?
- ska 9y ago
  Using telemetry to see how users use software is pointless. The word you are looking for here is something like "limited", not "pointless". Sure, there is noise in telemetry but there is also a lot of signal. And it is the sort of signal that is difficult to acquire. I'm certainly not convinced that for consumer grade applications opt out telemetry is a good thing, for lots of reasons. But none of them are "it isn't useful".
sjellis 9y ago
I've upvoted you, even though we obviously don't agree, because I think that was a really excellent response. Personally, I find that I have knee-jerk reaction to this. My feeling is that if something can be wrong or be abused, it will. That's why I feel that the best thing would be for opt-in telemetry to be simply put outside of consideration. This kind of data collection is something that we've given to ourselves as an industry in the past few years, but we've developed software for decades without it. IMO, developers definitely have no inherent right to extract data from user systems, especially with Open Source products, where the license effectively says that there are no strings, and no obligations. If we want this, I think that we should have to make the case for it.

by Sacho 9y ago

inetknght 9y ago

Using telemetry to see how users use software is pointless. It does nothing to actually explain why a user is doing something. So instead you have to have teams of people who try to make, at best, an educated guess about user activity and reasons behind them. If I'm clicking back and forth in a window, why should you assume it has something to do with your software? Yeah it's the most likely culprit in your opinion. But in my opinion I simply accidentally clicked somewhere, brought your window to focus, and went back to what I was doing elsewhere. Or clicked a button and clicked around to figure out how to undo it. I've seen tons of people with ADD-style clicking and typing while they're actually doing something completely irrelevant. It's literally just noise. Why do you need to try to interpret it?

ska 9y ago
Using telemetry to see how users use software is pointless. The word you are looking for here is something like "limited", not "pointless". Sure, there is noise in telemetry but there is also a lot of signal. And it is the sort of signal that is difficult to acquire. I'm certainly not convinced that for consumer grade applications opt out telemetry is a good thing, for lots of reasons. But none of them are "it isn't useful".

sjellis 9y ago

I've upvoted you, even though we obviously don't agree, because I think that was a really excellent response. Personally, I find that I have knee-jerk reaction to this. My feeling is that if something can be wrong or be abused, it will. That's why I feel that the best thing would be for opt-in telemetry to be simply put outside of consideration. This kind of data collection is something that we've given to ourselves as an industry in the past few years, but we've developed software for decades without it. IMO, developers definitely have no inherent right to extract data from user systems, especially with Open Source products, where the license effectively says that there are no strings, and no obligations. If we want this, I think that we should have to make the case for it.