5 ms·

I don’t mean to dismiss the importance of users owning and controlling their data, but isn’t telemetry a valid tool for software projects to gain valuable insig

• have_faith 3y ago
  > there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry There should be a way to opt-in. Anything else is egregious.
  • tilne 3y ago
    That’s fair. If the telemetry really is helpful to building a better product it should be an easy case to make to users.
    • sf_rob 3y ago
      If Telemetry is valuable, it's largely valuable to the degree it's representative. Opt-in sacrifices this and even a well optimized opt-in process won't prevent that. This is not to say that Telemetry should be opt-out, just that you place other justifications ahead of the usefulness of Telemetry (which is fine).
      • quickthrower2 3y ago
        These days I reckon running an LLM over the storybook discord and reddits would yield more valuable data. How big peoples projects are on average doesn’t matter. 100 people asking the same question does.
        • asoneth 3y ago
          I completely agree that qualitative feedback is the most valuable kind of product input. However, quantitative metrics like telemetry are used to answer different kinds of questions. > How big peoples projects are on average doesn’t matter. To give concrete examples, at my current company we do not collect telemetry and have regularly encountered problems where some assumption about customer usage (the number of items in the largest project, the size of the largest document, the smallest browser window, the oldest browser version, the usage of a deprecated feature) turns out to be incorrect, sometimes wildly so, and we only find out after a customer finally complains that they've been struggling with something for months. If we had telemetry we could have known about these issues well ahead of time and in many cases avoided the problem in the first place. We still choose not to have telemetry for many of the reasons presented in other comments, but we should at least be honest that it can provide immense value to the product team.
      • denton-scratch 3y ago
        > Opt-in sacrifices this You're right. Opt-in results in a survey population that is self-selected, and therefore largely meaningless. But compulsory participation in surveys is deeply objectionable; just because it's easy doesn't make it OK. So you can't have representative telemetry that is also optional (for the user). So firms should stop trying to use telemetry, unless they're OK with telemetry data from a narrow pool of users, e.g. users of Beta versions of software.
    • armchairhacker 3y ago
      The problem is most people really don’t care about telemetry, but don’t even care enough to opt themselves in. It’s simply not in their focus. I think a very pronounced opt-out is fine, because it means anyone who is remotely against telemetry can leave, but you still get data from those who genuinely don’t care. Opt-in means you only take data from those who are explicitly for telemetry, which is a very small and not representative number. Opt-out does have to be visible and pronounced though, and not have any drawbacks. “opt-out” through 30 secret menus which are only known to those who read internet forums doesn’t count, because you’re still secretly collecting telemetry from those who aren’t aware; and wording like “opt-in by default” is flat-out misleading (it’s like saying “made by metal artisans” when the “metal artisans” are literally robots). I’m pretty sure it’s also not necessary: even if there’s a big checkbox “enable telemetry” which is on-by-default, or in this case a flag `telemetry: false` which is very well-documented, the majorly of people choose the path of least resistance and will keep it enabled.
    • bluefishinit 3y ago
      "Better products" don't spy on me. As a user, I don't want any information about my usage leaving my machine. In addition to privacy issues, this is now code that needs to be maintained, discussed, debugged... that has nothing to do with why I'm using the software. It's an entire feature set that costs money and time and technical complexity that provides literally no value to people using the tool for its intended purpose. Software is best when it's designed and built by an expert with an opinion. You can look at things like Linux or vim as an example.
      • pimterry 3y ago
        This is overly reductive. All software - including Linux and vim - makes some choices that benefit the developer over the user. Any choice of technology or software architecture with consideration of developer ergonomics is doing this. Every app that ever shipped with a runtime abstraction (classes, dependency injection, testable code patterns, debug logging, etc) chose to make the software fractionally worse for the user, to help the developers to actually write the software. There is a meaningful and debatable tradeoff in all such decisions, and it's not clear cut. It is often (but not always) sensible for software to include extra code that, yes, must be maintained etc, which exists purely to make the development process of the software more effective. All extra code like this is strictly speaking a bad thing for users when considered in isolation, but overall improvements in development processes (better software, fewer bugs, quicker fixes) mean it's a net benefit for the user in the end, hopefully. In this case, these developers genuinely do think the telemetry will help them build better software. You may not agree! That's an interesting point to explore, but their opinion is that the maintenance cost is worthwhile for the benefits that this information will provide. They think that the downsides of telemetry will be outweighed by the resulting significant improvements for people using the tool for its intended purpose. They may well be totally wrong - there's an interesting balance there that is worth discussing, in terms of concrete benefits and real-world costs. Reducing all DX code to "literally no value" though is unhelpful and misses the real discussion.
        • bluefishinit 3y ago
          > This is overly reductive. No, as a user I really don't want my usage data leaving my machine. There is no justification worth that to me.
  • vijaybritto 3y ago
    I have the same opinion on telemetry but I have never opted in for any tool no matter how politely they asked and also never seen any other technical person doing it either. So maybe for software developers it doesn't work if it's opt-in and opt-out is a good strategy?
    • have_faith 3y ago
      People don't want their privacy violated. It doesn't matter what data you're collecting. If you peer into my windows every day in order to document the colour of the paint on my walls, you don't get to use a defence of "I was only interested in unidentifiable information and besides, they wouldn't let me do it when I asked nicely". Software installed on my machine is in a privileged position. It has more access to my personal files than my close friends and relatives. I'd rather that software respected some simple boundaries.
• pydry 3y ago
  I think its value is considerably overstated from the use I've seen made of it. Executives absolutely love it though. It makes them feel scientific in their decision making and gives them ass-cover when justifying their decisions. I really think that the ability to collect opt in opinions at strategic points in the app is vastly more effective, not to mention less creepy and invasive.
  • tilne 3y ago
    Absolutely agreed with the second point. I’m not sure I agree with the first though. At least not that that’s the main reason telemetry is desired from product teams. (Though obviously telemetry does provide fodder for that type of stupidity for sure.) To give a concrete example from my past experience, I used to work on a product that essentially knitted a bunch of services from a major cloud provider together to provide a user experience comparable to traditional HPC clusters. We never included telemetry, but we always wanted to in order to gain insight into how many compute queues people were using, how many VMs were in each of them, how many jobs were run over a certain amount of time, how many VMs those jobs ran across, etc. The sole reason we wanted this information was because the configuration exposed for this product was extremely complex, and we wanted to put layers on top of it to more easily enable the most common use cases. Is this not a legitimate reason to collect telemetry? Is the concern that, even though the dev team wanted the data for legitimate purposes, eventually bad actors will use the capability to start collecting data for more nefarious purposes? Edit: I see you amended the original to include a statement about opt-in opinions. What do you mean by that?
    • pydry 3y ago
      My edited statement wasnt directed at you (Ive only just read your reply) but it does indirectly answer your question. What I mean is that you survey your users via your app on, say, the config page and ask them if they think its too complex and if it would benefit from layers or whatever and always let then enter an optional opinion when you do.
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Telemetry is fine, it's just that under GDPR and co, it has to be opt-in; the user needs to make an informed decision on whether or not the app can collect and share telemetry.
  • goenning 3y ago
    If it truly is anonymous and there’s no PII or any persistent identifier (like a Machine ID) being collected, then GDPR doesn’t apply
    • ptx 3y ago
      The data is not likely to be truly anonymous in practice. Making sure it's truly anonymous takes more work and makes it less useful than not-quite-anonymous, so there's no incentive to do a good job of it. Instead you end up with e.g. Microsoft's constant stream of "oops, we forgot to inform you of the data collection", "oops, we collected more data than intended", "oops, we sent it to our servers accidentally", "oops, it wasn't really anonymous" (e.g. because they simply hashed an ID to anonymize it), and so on.
• yomlica8 3y ago
  If telemetry is so valuable these companies should give you discounts or payments for enabling it instead of sneaking in like a thief in the night to take it. A lot of modern software seems overloaded with dark patterns to trick users into unintended actions that make the company more money. I suspect for many companies telemetry's real value is for marketing research and A/B testing the effectiveness of the latest dark pattern implementations.
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  > isn’t telemetry a valid tool for software projects to gain valuable insights into how their product is being used and thus how to improve it? "Valid" is doing a lot of work here. Trivially, telemetry can provide insights. That's obvious. But how are users supposed to divine which insights the telemetry is supposed to provide? What if the data-collector doesn't know what they're looking for, and is just scraping everything? > the spirit of “telemetry by default is bad” and I don’t really agree. You're entitled to your view. My view is that telemetry (i.e. remotely observing what I do on my computer) is definitely "bad", if I don't consent to it explicitly.