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> The best possible experience starts with not being spied on, especially against my consent. No feature is worth that. This kind of knee-jerk reaction says th

> The best possible experience starts with not being spied on, especially against my consent. No feature is worth that. This kind of knee-jerk reaction says that there is no comment in the universe that would make you entertain a different perspective. That's fine, that's not what this comment is going to be. Instead, I'll say this: the default assumption of ie "collecting crash data equates to invading my personal privacy" is just wildly off-base. I will freely admit that there are plenty of companies who have abused the concept of the always-on-network connection and are doing hardcore data-mining almost at the keylogger level. That's bad, 100%. But there is a large majority of data-driven companies who are actively trying to make your experience with their software better, with the small team that they have. To say "well f them, they can try to divine how I, Power Linux User, would even use their software" is reductive and puts an engineering team at a distinct disadvantage and slows their overall output. This is not what you, as a user of their software, want, and it is ultimately a self-defeating argument. "Create great solutions" does not happen in the year of our lord 2023 without data. That data needs to come from somewhere, and "make it easy to report bugs" isn't it.

wootland 4y ago
> there is no comment in the universe that would make you entertain a different perspective. You're correct in that there is no comment in the universe that would make me ok with being spied on. That's not a "knee-jerk reaction" though, it's privacy and consent 101. > "Create great solutions" does not happen in the year of our lord 2023 without data. It's true that there's a trend toward dark patterns and spying, which is exactly why we as users should resist and not allow it to be framed as the status quo. Great software has been created for decades, a lot of it still in use, without a hint of spyware or analytics.
ricardobeat 4y ago
I've lived in the data-driven mindset for many years, and ultimately found that it still consists of mostly guesswork, opinions and strong biases everywhere. People make product decisions and they will seek the data to validate what they already want [1] anyway. It should complement, not replace talking to users, and is not a requirement to build great products. When it comes to simple anonymized telemetry, one user or subset of users, spamming the same error over and over will skew your data, and unless you track them even more you won't be able to tell the difference. As I said earlier, it's a slippery slope to stand on. Comprehensive telemetry/tracking is fine for say, an e-commerce website or any kind of cloud application where you're already receiving all the user input anyway. It's also fine, with consent, for desktop apps, especially complex ones like IDEs etc. It is not OK for third-party software packages that you'll ship to your own users - regardless of any promise to not add tracking to the resulting build, since at this point they already broke that wall and it only takes one "well-intentioned" PM to make it happen. [1] a system that evolves automatically by running stochastic A/B tests is something many have dreamed up including myself. I'm really curious what that would end up looking like. That's being truly data-driven!

wootland 4y ago

> there is no comment in the universe that would make you entertain a different perspective. You're correct in that there is no comment in the universe that would make me ok with being spied on. That's not a "knee-jerk reaction" though, it's privacy and consent 101. > "Create great solutions" does not happen in the year of our lord 2023 without data. It's true that there's a trend toward dark patterns and spying, which is exactly why we as users should resist and not allow it to be framed as the status quo. Great software has been created for decades, a lot of it still in use, without a hint of spyware or analytics.

ricardobeat 4y ago

I've lived in the data-driven mindset for many years, and ultimately found that it still consists of mostly guesswork, opinions and strong biases everywhere. People make product decisions and they will seek the data to validate what they already want [1] anyway. It should complement, not replace talking to users, and is not a requirement to build great products. When it comes to simple anonymized telemetry, one user or subset of users, spamming the same error over and over will skew your data, and unless you track them even more you won't be able to tell the difference. As I said earlier, it's a slippery slope to stand on. Comprehensive telemetry/tracking is fine for say, an e-commerce website or any kind of cloud application where you're already receiving all the user input anyway. It's also fine, with consent, for desktop apps, especially complex ones like IDEs etc. It is not OK for third-party software packages that you'll ship to your own users - regardless of any promise to not add tracking to the resulting build, since at this point they already broke that wall and it only takes one "well-intentioned" PM to make it happen. [1] a system that evolves automatically by running stochastic A/B tests is something many have dreamed up including myself. I'm really curious what that would end up looking like. That's being truly data-driven!