6 ms·

>At some point we have to accept that this data actually helps them fix real issues too It is strange that this community of all communities has such a resista

by slg 5y ago

>At some point we have to accept that this data actually helps them fix real issues too It is strange that this community of all communities has such a resistance to this idea. Software developers should know better than anyone how difficult it is to identify and fix vague software problems without having specific details about the problem. Yes, there is a negotiation between the value of telemetry and privacy and often too much privacy is sacrificed. But I am always surprised to hear developers say all telemetry is bad.

koolba 5y ago
It’s the difference between always sending something and a pop up asking if you want to send a bug report.
- FinalBriefing 5y ago
  How about performance issues and silent errors? Finding areas that need to me optimized because a lot of users have subtle issues kinda needs passive data collection. As long as it is anonymous, it's a good thing, IMO.
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    Yup. A previous company I worked at used assert calls in the code. In a debug build of the firmware, if an assert failed, it would crash the device and on the display it would show the file and line number of the assert call. In production firmware, it would silently ignore it, and if you had opted in to sending usage data, it would phone home and report the failed assert, though I don't know what extra data was included.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      The key still being "if you had opted in".
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    > As long as it is anonymous, it's a good thing, IMO. As long as users give informed consent, then it's acceptable.
conradev 5y ago
I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better. Transparency is key here. If projects explained the steps taken to anonymize the data (either provably using Differential Privacy, or approximated via some other means), I feel like people might trust them more. Even with DP, though, the server does see IP addresses, even if it doesn't know what the telemetry is, and that alone might cross the line for some people. Even if the project promises to not log them.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better. Can you give 1(one) example of a program which was improved by using telemetry ? And no, trashing the UI in the name of change or modernism does not count. Thank you.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    Windows.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      How? I mean, in what way, and in response to which metrics?
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Windows went downhill fast since introduction of telemetry.
      - philliphaydon 5y ago
        Windows 10 is better than any previous version of Windows. So how did it go downhill?
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        User experience. Windows 10 was an upgrade over 8, which was a huge downgrade over 7. Not only did telemetry not help Microsoft improve the UX of their OS after Windows 7, in Windows 10 it's been getting worse with each update, and Windows 11 is slated to be a disaster.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
It helps that when you have a front row seat at a butcher's house, you become somewhat averse to eating meat as part of your regular diet. From that perspective, it is really not that surprising.
- bialpio 5y ago
  I like this analogy, let's run with it even further! Can the aversion be caused by watching butchers that kill animals in an inhumane way, in a dirty shed? (i.e. if you observe telemetry data being abused at the company you work for and that is tolerated, you'll be wary of any telemetry?)
oehpr 5y ago
Because the visual difference between abusive telemetry and benign or useful telemetry is 0. Same with disclosures. And we are a very abused culture sitting in the middle of what I hope is peak surveillance capitalism. Beat someone with a stick enough, and when you go to scratch your back and they flinch, it's not sensible to deride them for being irrational.
tomc1985 5y ago
I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business software where the expectation of privacy is already moot. Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many GDC talks I've watched that discussed player heatmaps, incident (like death) reports, and whatnot used to fine-tune game balance. There are numerous places where telemetry is completely inappropriate, like one's operating system. An idle computer should indeed be 100% idle, internal housekeeping exempted. (I recently installed freebsd on a new server, did some setup, and basked in the glory of htop showing 32 cores at 0.0% and a root process list that was under a page long. I wish other operating systems could follow that example)
- ashton314 5y ago
  > freebsd on a new server It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that, you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows what. (Just my small experience.)
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. Run GNOME on FreeBSD and you'll get the same huge list of processes.
    - cesarb 5y ago
      > If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. It depends on which processes. If you include kernel threads (which show as processes), the number of processes can get pretty huge, especially on many-core servers (several of these kernel threads are per-core). I don't know whether on FreeBSD kernel threads show up as separate processes; if they don't, it might explain part of the difference.
    - 5y ago
TeMPOraL 5y ago
There are at least two distinct issues here this community is concerned about: 1. Telemetry is unethical if the users didn't provide informed consent (opt-in) for it. It's not just a theoretical point - anyone who's worked in tech sector for a while should know most companies cannot be trusted to behave ethically (especially if they took VC funding). 2. There's a certain dysfunction/antipattern that's popular in tech sector, called being a "data-driven company". It's the practice of making decisions through divination from data collected through extensive telemetry, to the exclusion of other knowledge sources (like e.g. actually talking to your users, hallway testing, or thinking things through). This leads to software being optimized in questionable directions - so in a sense, you could say that adding telemetry implies an increased chance the software will become worse over time.
- cylon13 5y ago
  Worse in a really insidious way too. Optimizing based on engagement for instance could be maxxing the amount of time people spend using a service, while minning unseen variables people care about like their emotional state while engaged. It’s sort of an inevitable thing that optimizers do to things they don’t measure, and it’s an extremely difficult problem to put everything people care about into the equation. Like for instance, think of how horrible a polynomial fit gets for a function just outside the window you are fitting as you add more terms.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    > But last week, Facebook revealed that it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million randomly selected users to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw. It was part of a psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread on social media. Doing such a study would be the first step in optimizing for a good emotional state. But it (quite understandably) led to an outcry which stopped it dead in its tracks. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
    - 5y ago
JohnFen 5y ago
> It is strange that this community of all communities has such a resistance to this idea. I don't think many people here have any resistance to this. It's simply true. I think a lot of people, though, think that benefit isn't sufficient to overcome the drawbacks.

by slg 5y ago

koolba 5y ago

It’s the difference between always sending something and a pop up asking if you want to send a bug report.

FinalBriefing 5y ago
How about performance issues and silent errors? Finding areas that need to me optimized because a lot of users have subtle issues kinda needs passive data collection. As long as it is anonymous, it's a good thing, IMO.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  Yup. A previous company I worked at used assert calls in the code. In a debug build of the firmware, if an assert failed, it would crash the device and on the display it would show the file and line number of the assert call. In production firmware, it would silently ignore it, and if you had opted in to sending usage data, it would phone home and report the failed assert, though I don't know what extra data was included.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    The key still being "if you had opted in".
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > As long as it is anonymous, it's a good thing, IMO. As long as users give informed consent, then it's acceptable.

conradev 5y ago

I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better. Transparency is key here. If projects explained the steps taken to anonymize the data (either provably using Differential Privacy, or approximated via some other means), I feel like people might trust them more. Even with DP, though, the server does see IP addresses, even if it doesn't know what the telemetry is, and that alone might cross the line for some people. Even if the project promises to not log them.

hulitu 5y ago
> I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better. Can you give 1(one) example of a program which was improved by using telemetry ? And no, trashing the UI in the name of change or modernism does not count. Thank you.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Windows.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    How? I mean, in what way, and in response to which metrics?
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Windows went downhill fast since introduction of telemetry.
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      Windows 10 is better than any previous version of Windows. So how did it go downhill?
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        User experience. Windows 10 was an upgrade over 8, which was a huge downgrade over 7. Not only did telemetry not help Microsoft improve the UX of their OS after Windows 7, in Windows 10 it's been getting worse with each update, and Windows 11 is slated to be a disaster.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

It helps that when you have a front row seat at a butcher's house, you become somewhat averse to eating meat as part of your regular diet. From that perspective, it is really not that surprising.

bialpio 5y ago
I like this analogy, let's run with it even further! Can the aversion be caused by watching butchers that kill animals in an inhumane way, in a dirty shed? (i.e. if you observe telemetry data being abused at the company you work for and that is tolerated, you'll be wary of any telemetry?)

oehpr 5y ago

Because the visual difference between abusive telemetry and benign or useful telemetry is 0. Same with disclosures. And we are a very abused culture sitting in the middle of what I hope is peak surveillance capitalism. Beat someone with a stick enough, and when you go to scratch your back and they flinch, it's not sensible to deride them for being irrational.

tomc1985 5y ago

I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business software where the expectation of privacy is already moot. Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many GDC talks I've watched that discussed player heatmaps, incident (like death) reports, and whatnot used to fine-tune game balance. There are numerous places where telemetry is completely inappropriate, like one's operating system. An idle computer should indeed be 100% idle, internal housekeeping exempted. (I recently installed freebsd on a new server, did some setup, and basked in the glory of htop showing 32 cores at 0.0% and a root process list that was under a page long. I wish other operating systems could follow that example)

ashton314 5y ago
> freebsd on a new server It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that, you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows what. (Just my small experience.)
- gtirloni 5y ago
  If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. Run GNOME on FreeBSD and you'll get the same huge list of processes.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    > If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. It depends on which processes. If you include kernel threads (which show as processes), the number of processes can get pretty huge, especially on many-core servers (several of these kernel threads are per-core). I don't know whether on FreeBSD kernel threads show up as separate processes; if they don't, it might explain part of the difference.
  - 5y ago

TeMPOraL 5y ago

There are at least two distinct issues here this community is concerned about: 1. Telemetry is unethical if the users didn't provide informed consent (opt-in) for it. It's not just a theoretical point - anyone who's worked in tech sector for a while should know most companies cannot be trusted to behave ethically (especially if they took VC funding). 2. There's a certain dysfunction/antipattern that's popular in tech sector, called being a "data-driven company". It's the practice of making decisions through divination from data collected through extensive telemetry, to the exclusion of other knowledge sources (like e.g. actually talking to your users, hallway testing, or thinking things through). This leads to software being optimized in questionable directions - so in a sense, you could say that adding telemetry implies an increased chance the software will become worse over time.

cylon13 5y ago
Worse in a really insidious way too. Optimizing based on engagement for instance could be maxxing the amount of time people spend using a service, while minning unseen variables people care about like their emotional state while engaged. It’s sort of an inevitable thing that optimizers do to things they don’t measure, and it’s an extremely difficult problem to put everything people care about into the equation. Like for instance, think of how horrible a polynomial fit gets for a function just outside the window you are fitting as you add more terms.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  > But last week, Facebook revealed that it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million randomly selected users to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw. It was part of a psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread on social media. Doing such a study would be the first step in optimizing for a good emotional state. But it (quite understandably) led to an outcry which stopped it dead in its tracks. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
  - 5y ago

JohnFen 5y ago

> It is strange that this community of all communities has such a resistance to this idea. I don't think many people here have any resistance to this. It's simply true. I think a lot of people, though, think that benefit isn't sufficient to overcome the drawbacks.