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There is a sizeable group of people - of whom I am one - who accept that software telemetry is incredibly valuable for making decisions about the future of a pr

There is a sizeable group of people - of whom I am one - who accept that software telemetry is incredibly valuable for making decisions about the future of a project. They simply want the use of it to be their choice. Continuing to hold this opinion does not imply that their opinions have somehow been manipulated or changed. As for the Overton Window - telemetry has been a part of software since the internet was a thing. And it will continue to be a thing long into the future. I just fight to keep it as a choice for the user.

deafpolygon 3y ago
By accepting telemetry as a standard practice, it won't be a choice soon.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It is as long as I have a firewall.
jjav 3y ago
> As for the Overton Window - telemetry has been a part of software since the internet was a thing. Not true. As I mentioned in a separate comment, in the 90s (and even somewhat into the early part of 00s) adding any kind of phone-home functionality to code was pretty much universally seen as outrageous privacy violation. Go back to, say, year 2000 and post on a technical newsgroup about having noticed some code phoning home and watch the outrage fly. This was seen as a line that must absolutely never be crossed. So yes, the overton window has done a massive shift.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > in the 90s (and even somewhat into the early part of 00s) adding any kind of phone-home functionality to code was pretty much universally seen as outrageous privacy violation. Yep. And I remember a few very heated fights between dev teams and marketing teams over it. Devs universally fought adding telemetry because it's an abuse of users and user trust. Marketing universally fought for adding it because it allowed them to sell more efficiently.
- revelio 3y ago
  Hate to break it to you but it wasn't ever considered outrageous by anyone except a tiny minority of extremely loud geeks who knew how to use the right forums and right rhetoric to have disproportionate impact on other fellow geeks. The 90s-early 2000s were the era where the internet exploded and the dev community decided en-masse to start shipping software as web apps. Web apps are notable for giving massive streams of 'telemetry' to the web server operators as a natural consequence of how they work. Nobody cared and the change was embraced because the value of those server logs was so high that web-based SaaS companies could easily outcompete people steeped in client-side "your mouse clicks are private" culture. Eventually, web culture had to be forced on the desktop people. At Google they were distributing desktop apps and the command came from the very top (Larry Page) that Google's software updates should work just like the web. Silent, background, no end user control, no confirmation popups. Stuff just updates. Of course, huge uproar. End users should be in control of their computer etc. Nothing worked like that at the time. Page insisted: do it or you're fired, so it got done. Users loved it, that model turned out to be extremely successful and became a key competitive advantage for Chrome when it launched, one that others have since copied. The Overton Window shifted because the window only existed at all in programming culture. It took confident and in-control CEOs like Page and Jobs to kick developers out of their ideological cubby-hole and into a place that better suited the huge majority of end users, who really couldn't care less if some guy they never met knows how many seconds they spent looking at the welcome screen. But they do care a lot about whether their tech actually works reliably.

deafpolygon 3y ago

By accepting telemetry as a standard practice, it won't be a choice soon.

JohnFen 3y ago
It is as long as I have a firewall.

jjav 3y ago

> As for the Overton Window - telemetry has been a part of software since the internet was a thing. Not true. As I mentioned in a separate comment, in the 90s (and even somewhat into the early part of 00s) adding any kind of phone-home functionality to code was pretty much universally seen as outrageous privacy violation. Go back to, say, year 2000 and post on a technical newsgroup about having noticed some code phoning home and watch the outrage fly. This was seen as a line that must absolutely never be crossed. So yes, the overton window has done a massive shift.

JohnFen 3y ago
> in the 90s (and even somewhat into the early part of 00s) adding any kind of phone-home functionality to code was pretty much universally seen as outrageous privacy violation. Yep. And I remember a few very heated fights between dev teams and marketing teams over it. Devs universally fought adding telemetry because it's an abuse of users and user trust. Marketing universally fought for adding it because it allowed them to sell more efficiently.
revelio 3y ago
Hate to break it to you but it wasn't ever considered outrageous by anyone except a tiny minority of extremely loud geeks who knew how to use the right forums and right rhetoric to have disproportionate impact on other fellow geeks. The 90s-early 2000s were the era where the internet exploded and the dev community decided en-masse to start shipping software as web apps. Web apps are notable for giving massive streams of 'telemetry' to the web server operators as a natural consequence of how they work. Nobody cared and the change was embraced because the value of those server logs was so high that web-based SaaS companies could easily outcompete people steeped in client-side "your mouse clicks are private" culture. Eventually, web culture had to be forced on the desktop people. At Google they were distributing desktop apps and the command came from the very top (Larry Page) that Google's software updates should work just like the web. Silent, background, no end user control, no confirmation popups. Stuff just updates. Of course, huge uproar. End users should be in control of their computer etc. Nothing worked like that at the time. Page insisted: do it or you're fired, so it got done. Users loved it, that model turned out to be extremely successful and became a key competitive advantage for Chrome when it launched, one that others have since copied. The Overton Window shifted because the window only existed at all in programming culture. It took confident and in-control CEOs like Page and Jobs to kick developers out of their ideological cubby-hole and into a place that better suited the huge majority of end users, who really couldn't care less if some guy they never met knows how many seconds they spent looking at the welcome screen. But they do care a lot about whether their tech actually works reliably.