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What is the thought process that goes into thinking such a thing is a good idea, then proposing it, arguing for it, and then it being approved (presumably) by p
by titzer 3y ago
What is the thought process that goes into thinking such a thing is a good idea, then proposing it, arguing for it, and then it being approved (presumably) by product managers and executives?
It's just a downward spiral at this point as each new generation of software and each new year brings a worse and worse privacy default with even more self-justification and half-assed anonymization.
Drivers need to know website usage statistics. Are we really here now?
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThe process that is motivated by profits. Here’s the thing. It not only got approved but it almost certainly got some people promoted.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoAdd to this a total and utter lack of any interest from any political parties with any chance of being elected to govern a country. User-hostility in the privacy realm is open slather. It's (more than?) likely to be encouraged by political parties because they can buy and use the data for their, inarguably worse for society, constituent-hostile political gaming. The pirates are the corporates and there is no law under which the pillaged can seek protection.
- saiya-jin 3y agoYeah, you can't say a big no-no to private companies doing this and in the same time collect everything on everybody without any good law to back it up, even about hobo half around the world as long as they leave any kind of data trail (or somebody else does on their behalf). Somebody may connect the dots and uses it against you in election campaigns. So we are where we are, all politicians are well aware of this topic, all pros and cons, but nobody wants to touch it with 10m pole unless they can somehow spin it into their advantage. But then again, politicians have supporters, donations etc. Can't bite the hand that feeds you, can you. And there is always that cheap argument about 'think about the children...' when terrorists don't terrorize general population enough.
- rvnx 3y agoIf they would collect what games you are playing, to know on which games they have to optimize the drivers / framerate down-the-road that'd be ok. But websites you visit...
- amelius 3y agoTo be fair, websites can also contain games and other stuff that might use a GPU.
- Dalewyn 3y agoHardware accelerated video decoding for Youtube, Twitch, etc. for a very mundane example.
- bogwog 3y agoI don't think Intel needs telemetry to know their customers use Youtube and Twitch.
- Retric 3y agoThe ratios might be important if they want to optimize battery life, performance, and video quality.
- pixelpoet 3y agoA tiny scrappy startup like Intel definitely needs to prioritise between YouTube and Twitch optimisation, and the best way to get that information is by spying on everyone, all the time. I get playing devil's advocate, but come on...
- Retric 3y agoIt’s easy enough to slap a top 500 list as your benchmark but their size is why they should be aiming higher than that.
- globular-toast 3y agoHave you ever worked in a big company? Appeals to ethics or even common sense won't get you very far. On the other hand, just doing what you're told is expected and rewarded. Like the Emperor's New Clothes. You either play along with the narrow-minded, often cultish, pursuit of whatever is deemed good for "the business", or you leave.
- titzer 3y agoI have.
- anotherhue 3y agoIt's the "Don't be Evil" rule at work again.
- Retric 3y ago<devils advocate> Knowing what websites people visit and for how long isn’t unreasonable if you want to create a test that mimics how a GPU gets used in practice. Compare your GPU’s performance with competitors across the top X popular websites looking for outliers. Then start optimizing and retest while regularly updating that list with new data in case something starts to become popular. They could get this kind of data from a third party, but collecting it themselves is more representative of their customers and possibly cheaper.
- titzer 3y agoThis is the role of benchmark suites and top 500 lists.
- Retric 3y agoI would hope they are looking well pat the top 500, top 5,000 or 50,000 perhaps but then the bottom of larger lists also vary more. I think we can all agree the most likely explanation isn’t so flattering here, but it’s possible they really are trying to model the real world accurately in their test environment.
- magicalist 3y ago> I would hope they are looking well pat the top 500, top 5,000 or 50,000 perhaps but then the bottom of larger lists also vary more. How are they going to do that if they only know the website category? Conveniently useful for marketing, though.
- Retric 3y agoI was considering the reverse. How well can they assign a category for a site your visiting if they are only have mapping for the top 500 websites to those 30 categories? Anything they don’t have a mapping for is presumably just ‘other’ which isn’t useful. ARC gammers will likely be spending a lot of time on game specific message boards for example, but individually few of those websites are going to rank high on global top 500 lists. Having such wide categories seems useless, but it might help justify fixing bugs on say pornographic websites if a large percentage of users are having issues. Not the kind of conversation you want to have with your boss, but it’s exactly the kind of problem that could harm sales without anyone noticing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ek750 3y agoSadly yes. I've dealt with product managers that want these sort of things, and when I explain why I think it's a bad idea, it completely flies over their head at mach 2. They really don't get it. At least the ones I've dealt with in this context. As much as I hate to say it, I think trying to push back at the individual level in a corp setting is not going to work.