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I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps i

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not). Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do that. That's why telemetry is useful.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Believe me, I understand the appeal. Yesterday we were discussing something dropping support for some platforms from an open source project and the issue is... we have no way of determining how many installs are on such platforms. Telemetry would fix this, but it's not our right to collect data from other people's machines. So our best bet would be to detect the condition we expect to cause problems, notify them in advance, and allow time for feedback before implementing a change. Is it less pretty and a worse user experience than telemetry? Absolutely. But when you realize you have no right to data collection on someone else's machine, telemetry isn't a viable option, and we would betray people's trust by doing it.
- gostsamo 5y ago
  This would be true if you had an involved user based that follows your communication channels and can give you feedback through the proper channel for each change that you might make. If you have a change surface of hundreds of features/parameters, then it gets rather tricky. Edit: typo.
- judge2020 5y ago
  A checkbox (defaulted to disabled) during setup is the best option in my opinion.
- josefx 5y ago
  > Yesterday we were discussing something dropping support for some platforms from an open source project and the issue is... we have no way of determining how many installs are on such platforms. You seem to be assuming that your users are always online and not sitting somewhere isolated, the ideal place for platforms old enough that you want to stop supporting them. Telemetry only tells you if something is there, it doesn't tell you if something isn't.
- asoneth 5y ago
  I'm in a similar predicament for a business application. We've resorted to the "scream test". When there are features that are expensive to maintain that we suspect aren't being used (based on surveys, interviews, and usability tests) then we insert a notification when the feature is used announcing it's pending removal in some subsequent version. The notification includes contact information so if we get a higher-than-expected number of complaints then we may keep the feature.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  [ ] shitty option A [ ] shitty option B Telemetry showed that users overwhelmingly approve of shitty option B!
  - recursive 5y ago
    Whether or not any of your options are good is a completely separate concern from whether or not you're using telemetry. If option B is the least bad option available, it's still better than A. Of course, you could also include a good option, and then telemetry would show a preference for that one.
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      Will you next explain that water is wet? The point of the comment is to show that telemetry is used to conclude things that aren't true, and it absolutely is, and only says the subset of things that someone wants to hear, or that even occurs to them to ask. It's not even really a seperate issue, because even if you think you are only concerned with say how long a certain operation takes or how frequently it fails & retries, the more important issue may be why or whether that operation was even used at all in the first place. This aspect of telemetry is simply a fact to be aware of and stands on it's own, and does not necessarily mean to say "therefor telemetry is an invalid tool that should not exist and should never be used" It just means it's incomplete at best and very susceptible to both deception and self deception.
sce 5y ago
> I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to the average user) etc., and I would be much more happy to share that data with firefox if I can see it first.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Windows is doing well in this regard in that 11 (and some earlier versions of 10) includes a 'View diagnostic data' button in settings that starts duplicating shipped-off telemetry to the local disk for inspection. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-data-viewer-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...
- shakna 5y ago
  > I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. Go to about:telemetry There are several pages detailing all of that information, and you can also get all of that data as the JSON payload if you want to munge and display it yourself.
  - throwaway946513 5y ago
    I didn't know this existed - thank you for sharing. I've shared telemetry on Firefox, but wasn't sure exactly what was being sent so this helps quite a bit more.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    That gave me a laugh. Had no idea this existed, thanks.
    - shakna 5y ago
      For those who may be curious, Firefox still lists all their metapages [0], which makes exploring under the hood pretty easy. [0] about:about
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
We live in a time when wrong think can get you cancelled and Firefox has demonstrated a strong ideological bias towards those groups that love to engage in cancel culture. The telemetry might be entirely technical in nature but both ability and the motive are there for it to be something much worse. At a minimum Firefox needs 100% transparency into who had access to the data, how it is secured, its exact uses, and timely updates if any of the above changes. There's too much potential for an "overzealous staffer" to take this technical only telemetry (whatever that might mean) and have it analyzed and released for their own purposes.
- _dark_matter_ 5y ago
  I used to work on Mozilla's data platform. That stuff is all open source. See e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ for the ingestion pipeline, https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl for queries/ETL, and https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ for looker model definitions for that data. Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/ https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data. I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Please keep political commentary off HN. > …Firefox has demonstrated a strong ideological bias towards those groups that love to engage in cancel culture.
- throwaway946513 5y ago
  As another commenter stated you can go to about:telemetry and see what data is being shared.
badsectoracula 5y ago
> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. People don't want to be spied on. Yes, you can find positive uses for it, but you can find positive uses for many negative technologies. If anything some of the most pervasive negative technologies also have positive uses to sweeten the pill (or even give the impression that this is a sweet and not a pill you are swallowing).
_jal 5y ago
> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. > it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer. Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? And the answer is you can't, because the difference between 'telemetry' and 'surveillance' lies in the intent of the consumer of that data. Technically useful information collected in good faith today can become intrusive surveillance tomorrow with a court order, or business pivot, or just a bored insider & lack controls. Now consider the fact that the author of every stupid new piece of code out there now seems to think it is so special it deserves to be allowed to send... who knows what back to some opaque collection endpoint as the cost of executing. The only reactions in response to this mess that don't cost a huge amount of overhead are "block everything" and "have your way with me". Guess which a technically inclined user picks.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  You shouldn't have had to say it, but thank you.
- brianguertin 5y ago
  > how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? Granularity. Telemetry data can be privacy-respecting (e.g. anonymously aggregated) while still being useful. E.g. "143 people flew from NYC to LA this month" vs. "John Smith flew from NYC to LA at 2:00 pm on Tuesday."
  - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
    Do you want to be surveilled? We promise it's anonymized.
    - NullPrefix 5y ago
ineedasername 5y ago
In general for applications, I usually say no to telemetry because I don't know exactly what data is being captured and how much they're stretching the truth on what it will be used for.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
I work on a user-facing product and our users don't hesitate to provide feedback on stuff like long click sequences or bad keyboard navigation. In case of mozilla specifically telemetry didn't help them to not destroy firefox's UI.
- Narishma 5y ago
  In fact they often do the opposite and use telemetry data as justification for removing useful features.
pdimitar 5y ago
> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry Leaving your veiled insult aside, I think it's pretty easy to see but you don't want to listen to it. Namely: telemetry and surveillance are literally the same thing and the only difference lies in the goodwill of the steward of the data. I believe we've been witnesses, dozens of times, here on HN, about yet another "private data leak" because some company can't be bothered to hire an intern for $2000 a month to do proper data and security hygiene of some meager 3-4 disks that don't even total 10TB. So why should I trust companies by default to take good care of my data AND to use them for good only, when all the historical evidence points at them being unable to do either? Shouldn't I take the matter in my own hands? I answered yes and so I did. My PiHole black-holes anything such I can think of and until that gets criminalized I'll be freely admitting it anytime when asked.
michaelt 5y ago
> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users. But if the privacy-indifferent users are increasingly lost to Chrome, FF is probably left with an unusually privacy-conscious userbase.
- handrous 5y ago
  > Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users. I'd bet a graph of their privacy-focused:indifferent users over time would be U-shaped. Very high before, oh, I dunno, FF2.0 when the only reason non-nerds had it was because their nerdy friend/relative installed it for them. Lower when they were advertising all over the place and marketshare was growing ('08-'12? My memory's hazy). Higher now, as their userbase continues a years-long contraction and shifts toward being mostly nerds, again.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. I'll leave it to others to argue why it's a privacy problem, but I'd like to push back on the "useful" and "feedback" arguments. It's appealing to say "X% of our users use this; we should prioritize it", but Mozilla has a charming history of saying "only Y% of users use this feature; we'll remove it", and for bonus points, "after we pushed this option into a really obscure sub-menu, nobody uses it, so now we can remove it while claiming that nobody cares". That is, telemetry isn't even useful for the thing that people claim it's good at, because it only provides raw data that gets used to justify things regardless of reality.
handrous 5y ago
It's creepy. Like someone looking over your shoulder. Before it became normalized, that wasn't a niche opinion. I'm sure it's very useful for developing software. A camera behind me pointed at my screen might be even more useful[0]. Both are invasive and gross. [0] Session-recording spyware "telemetry" products practically are this, and are widely used. Watching their session playback, or ability to monitor live users on "your" site (but actually, on their computer) is disturbing.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

Believe me, I understand the appeal. Yesterday we were discussing something dropping support for some platforms from an open source project and the issue is... we have no way of determining how many installs are on such platforms. Telemetry would fix this, but it's not our right to collect data from other people's machines. So our best bet would be to detect the condition we expect to cause problems, notify them in advance, and allow time for feedback before implementing a change. Is it less pretty and a worse user experience than telemetry? Absolutely. But when you realize you have no right to data collection on someone else's machine, telemetry isn't a viable option, and we would betray people's trust by doing it.

gostsamo 5y ago
This would be true if you had an involved user based that follows your communication channels and can give you feedback through the proper channel for each change that you might make. If you have a change surface of hundreds of features/parameters, then it gets rather tricky. Edit: typo.
judge2020 5y ago
A checkbox (defaulted to disabled) during setup is the best option in my opinion.
josefx 5y ago
> Yesterday we were discussing something dropping support for some platforms from an open source project and the issue is... we have no way of determining how many installs are on such platforms. You seem to be assuming that your users are always online and not sitting somewhere isolated, the ideal place for platforms old enough that you want to stop supporting them. Telemetry only tells you if something is there, it doesn't tell you if something isn't.
asoneth 5y ago
I'm in a similar predicament for a business application. We've resorted to the "scream test". When there are features that are expensive to maintain that we suspect aren't being used (based on surveys, interviews, and usability tests) then we insert a notification when the feature is used announcing it's pending removal in some subsequent version. The notification includes contact information so if we get a higher-than-expected number of complaints then we may keep the feature.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
[ ] shitty option A [ ] shitty option B Telemetry showed that users overwhelmingly approve of shitty option B!
- recursive 5y ago
  Whether or not any of your options are good is a completely separate concern from whether or not you're using telemetry. If option B is the least bad option available, it's still better than A. Of course, you could also include a good option, and then telemetry would show a preference for that one.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    Will you next explain that water is wet? The point of the comment is to show that telemetry is used to conclude things that aren't true, and it absolutely is, and only says the subset of things that someone wants to hear, or that even occurs to them to ask. It's not even really a seperate issue, because even if you think you are only concerned with say how long a certain operation takes or how frequently it fails & retries, the more important issue may be why or whether that operation was even used at all in the first place. This aspect of telemetry is simply a fact to be aware of and stands on it's own, and does not necessarily mean to say "therefor telemetry is an invalid tool that should not exist and should never be used" It just means it's incomplete at best and very susceptible to both deception and self deception.

sce 5y ago

> I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to the average user) etc., and I would be much more happy to share that data with firefox if I can see it first.

judge2020 5y ago
Windows is doing well in this regard in that 11 (and some earlier versions of 10) includes a 'View diagnostic data' button in settings that starts duplicating shipped-off telemetry to the local disk for inspection. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-data-viewer-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...
shakna 5y ago
> I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. Go to about:telemetry There are several pages detailing all of that information, and you can also get all of that data as the JSON payload if you want to munge and display it yourself.
- throwaway946513 5y ago
  I didn't know this existed - thank you for sharing. I've shared telemetry on Firefox, but wasn't sure exactly what was being sent so this helps quite a bit more.
- seanw444 5y ago
  That gave me a laugh. Had no idea this existed, thanks.
  - shakna 5y ago
    For those who may be curious, Firefox still lists all their metapages [0], which makes exploring under the hood pretty easy. [0] about:about

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

We live in a time when wrong think can get you cancelled and Firefox has demonstrated a strong ideological bias towards those groups that love to engage in cancel culture. The telemetry might be entirely technical in nature but both ability and the motive are there for it to be something much worse. At a minimum Firefox needs 100% transparency into who had access to the data, how it is secured, its exact uses, and timely updates if any of the above changes. There's too much potential for an "overzealous staffer" to take this technical only telemetry (whatever that might mean) and have it analyzed and released for their own purposes.

_dark_matter_ 5y ago
I used to work on Mozilla's data platform. That stuff is all open source. See e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ for the ingestion pipeline, https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl for queries/ETL, and https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ for looker model definitions for that data. Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/ https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data. I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Please keep political commentary off HN. > …Firefox has demonstrated a strong ideological bias towards those groups that love to engage in cancel culture.
throwaway946513 5y ago
As another commenter stated you can go to about:telemetry and see what data is being shared.

badsectoracula 5y ago

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. People don't want to be spied on. Yes, you can find positive uses for it, but you can find positive uses for many negative technologies. If anything some of the most pervasive negative technologies also have positive uses to sweeten the pill (or even give the impression that this is a sweet and not a pill you are swallowing).

_jal 5y ago

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. > it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer. Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? And the answer is you can't, because the difference between 'telemetry' and 'surveillance' lies in the intent of the consumer of that data. Technically useful information collected in good faith today can become intrusive surveillance tomorrow with a court order, or business pivot, or just a bored insider & lack controls. Now consider the fact that the author of every stupid new piece of code out there now seems to think it is so special it deserves to be allowed to send... who knows what back to some opaque collection endpoint as the cost of executing. The only reactions in response to this mess that don't cost a huge amount of overhead are "block everything" and "have your way with me". Guess which a technically inclined user picks.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Brian_K_White 5y ago
You shouldn't have had to say it, but thank you.
brianguertin 5y ago
> how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? Granularity. Telemetry data can be privacy-respecting (e.g. anonymously aggregated) while still being useful. E.g. "143 people flew from NYC to LA this month" vs. "John Smith flew from NYC to LA at 2:00 pm on Tuesday."
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  Do you want to be surveilled? We promise it's anonymized.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago

ineedasername 5y ago

In general for applications, I usually say no to telemetry because I don't know exactly what data is being captured and how much they're stretching the truth on what it will be used for.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

I work on a user-facing product and our users don't hesitate to provide feedback on stuff like long click sequences or bad keyboard navigation. In case of mozilla specifically telemetry didn't help them to not destroy firefox's UI.

Narishma 5y ago
In fact they often do the opposite and use telemetry data as justification for removing useful features.

pdimitar 5y ago

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry Leaving your veiled insult aside, I think it's pretty easy to see but you don't want to listen to it. Namely: telemetry and surveillance are literally the same thing and the only difference lies in the goodwill of the steward of the data. I believe we've been witnesses, dozens of times, here on HN, about yet another "private data leak" because some company can't be bothered to hire an intern for $2000 a month to do proper data and security hygiene of some meager 3-4 disks that don't even total 10TB. So why should I trust companies by default to take good care of my data AND to use them for good only, when all the historical evidence points at them being unable to do either? Shouldn't I take the matter in my own hands? I answered yes and so I did. My PiHole black-holes anything such I can think of and until that gets criminalized I'll be freely admitting it anytime when asked.

michaelt 5y ago

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users. But if the privacy-indifferent users are increasingly lost to Chrome, FF is probably left with an unusually privacy-conscious userbase.

handrous 5y ago
> Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users. I'd bet a graph of their privacy-focused:indifferent users over time would be U-shaped. Very high before, oh, I dunno, FF2.0 when the only reason non-nerds had it was because their nerdy friend/relative installed it for them. Lower when they were advertising all over the place and marketshare was growing ('08-'12? My memory's hazy). Higher now, as their userbase continues a years-long contraction and shifts toward being mostly nerds, again.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. I'll leave it to others to argue why it's a privacy problem, but I'd like to push back on the "useful" and "feedback" arguments. It's appealing to say "X% of our users use this; we should prioritize it", but Mozilla has a charming history of saying "only Y% of users use this feature; we'll remove it", and for bonus points, "after we pushed this option into a really obscure sub-menu, nobody uses it, so now we can remove it while claiming that nobody cares". That is, telemetry isn't even useful for the thing that people claim it's good at, because it only provides raw data that gets used to justify things regardless of reality.

handrous 5y ago

It's creepy. Like someone looking over your shoulder. Before it became normalized, that wasn't a niche opinion. I'm sure it's very useful for developing software. A camera behind me pointed at my screen might be even more useful[0]. Both are invasive and gross. [0] Session-recording spyware "telemetry" products practically are this, and are widely used. Watching their session playback, or ability to monitor live users on "your" site (but actually, on their computer) is disturbing.