I work for an analytics company - that said, their malware example is one unlikely to come up in most user testing. I say most because I’ve seen some do user te

I work for an analytics company - that said, their malware example is one unlikely to come up in most user testing. I say most because I’ve seen some do user testing over Skype with the user’s real environment. Another piece of anecdata, I had a customer experiencing a bug I am confident I wouldn’t have uncovered even with intense technical communication without having session replay... our UI was breaking a POST request for a user and there was seemingly no way for it to do so, it turns out in a number field, Firefox had these up and down arrows to move the number up, but the attribute that received the value when doing this was different from expected when entering the number by keyboard. Anyways, the scary side of session replay does arguably outweigh the upsides. If you don’t know or care, and even if you do care it’s hard to make sure you never capture things like credit card numbers, etc... At my current company I’ve helped push a lot of things that make it darn near impossible for us to capture PII, but nothing is perfect. As someone else in this thread said, it would be nice if someone built an end to end OSS analytics tool that was anonymizes by default, but I think even the concept of anonymization is hard to tackle depending on how one defines anonymous. The set of features one uses, and the frequency and/or order of use can likely be identifying by some definition. Opt in, for the example I described (bug hunting) would be a totally reasonable use, but I bet you’d have a hard time justifying the cost of such a tool if you use it for such sparse cases, and you lose out on many other serendipitous discoveries. Again, if you think it’s morally wrong, there’s not much to argue with in terms of using such a feature :)