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"We are excited to announce the addition of telemetry in this release. [...] This feature can be easily turned off in the settings if desired." How did they kn

by rzzzt 4y ago

"We are excited to announce the addition of telemetry in this release. [...] This feature can be easily turned off in the settings if desired." How did they know in the previous 5 major versions which part of the product to improve?

snikolaev 4y ago
We didn't, hence we may have inadvertently improved the wrong areas. Although we have been receiving feedback from the community, it was never backed by concrete data and thus, we had to rely on our best guess.
- reilly3000 4y ago
  This is the best appeal for OSS I’ve seen in a while. Actively telling a project how to improve vs passively observing how the system is used in the aggregate: that is a choice each person should be offered to engage with the project, along with the right to lurk in peace or fix their problems their own ways. The data itself ought to be public, and if it can’t be then it shouldn’t be gathered. The insights from that data should come from the community, not just project leads. That data’s relevance to product development and design should be annotated on feature tickets. I am good with having a relationship with a project that involves sharing my behaviors within the system, others are not. As a user I do I want to be able to see if I’m way off the beaten path or using a popular method when I’m deciding if I should debug, research, or work around a problem. As a maintainer team, your time is precious and the BS is already thick, so I feel providing that visibility is the least I can do to contribute to your work. I feel very differently about this with respect to for-profits and my PII tied to behavioral records.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
They are "excited"? No end-user wants telemetry. They want software that works reliably. And when it doesn't work, they want customer service. Rarely do they get either. If end-users wanted "telemetry", then they would have asked for it in previous versions. Even once telemetry is added, there is still no reason to enable it by default. End-users that want/need to send data to the company, e.g., to back up their claims about deficiencies in the software, can easily enable it. Show us the contractual restrictions that limit how the data sent by the end-user can be used. Show us the guarantee or enforceable promise that this data collection will result in improvements that end-users want (versus only benefitting the company in some undisclosed way(s)). Why would anyone want to send behavioural data to a company with no enforceable promise of a benefit and no way to monitor how the data is used.

by rzzzt 4y ago

snikolaev 4y ago

We didn't, hence we may have inadvertently improved the wrong areas. Although we have been receiving feedback from the community, it was never backed by concrete data and thus, we had to rely on our best guess.

reilly3000 4y ago
This is the best appeal for OSS I’ve seen in a while. Actively telling a project how to improve vs passively observing how the system is used in the aggregate: that is a choice each person should be offered to engage with the project, along with the right to lurk in peace or fix their problems their own ways. The data itself ought to be public, and if it can’t be then it shouldn’t be gathered. The insights from that data should come from the community, not just project leads. That data’s relevance to product development and design should be annotated on feature tickets. I am good with having a relationship with a project that involves sharing my behaviors within the system, others are not. As a user I do I want to be able to see if I’m way off the beaten path or using a popular method when I’m deciding if I should debug, research, or work around a problem. As a maintainer team, your time is precious and the BS is already thick, so I feel providing that visibility is the least I can do to contribute to your work. I feel very differently about this with respect to for-profits and my PII tied to behavioral records.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

They are "excited"? No end-user wants telemetry. They want software that works reliably. And when it doesn't work, they want customer service. Rarely do they get either. If end-users wanted "telemetry", then they would have asked for it in previous versions. Even once telemetry is added, there is still no reason to enable it by default. End-users that want/need to send data to the company, e.g., to back up their claims about deficiencies in the software, can easily enable it. Show us the contractual restrictions that limit how the data sent by the end-user can be used. Show us the guarantee or enforceable promise that this data collection will result in improvements that end-users want (versus only benefitting the company in some undisclosed way(s)). Why would anyone want to send behavioural data to a company with no enforceable promise of a benefit and no way to monitor how the data is used.