4 ms·

I never understood all the hate we in the OSS world have with telemetry. Why? I mean if nvidia and red hat paid for this to be developed wouldn’t it help them c

I never understood all the hate we in the OSS world have with telemetry. Why? I mean if nvidia and red hat paid for this to be developed wouldn’t it help them continue to develop it by knowing how and where and how often it was used?

speed_spread 3y ago
Because it's never just for engineering purposes anymore. Marketing departments are CRAZY about consumer data of any kind and you can be assured the value of such collected data will be maximized on the information exchange market. Advertisers pay good money for trustable data streams, which can be essentially de-anonymized with enough cross correlation between sources. A GPU happens to be a good place to capture user activity, since from the screen buffer you can tell what website they visit, what videos they watch and what games they play. This stuff is rather hush hush not to scare people but it's also well documented and certainly not an unfounded conspiracy. Its also why Europeans have adopted far reaching privacy laws (GDPR), their industries don't rely on consumer surveillance the way Americans have developed for the last decades.
fragmede 3y ago
at the very least, crash reporting.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
Apple, which collects a lot of telemetry, made privacy a tenet of their brand, and they've successfully conflated the two in the mind of a layperson. Separately, most telemetry would tell stories like, "This project is a failure." Little incentive for people to adopt it. Then again, most OSS is ordered by the mania of its programmer-creators, not product or engineering quality informed by telemetry. Maybe in a Darwinian way, we only have the OSS that can thrive without telemetry and reactive product and engineering decisions.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  Debian, RedHat and Firefox do have telemetry. Not a lot, but enough to prove it is possible to do it in a way that doesn't piss most people off. Naturally the way they collect it is open source, it's largely de-identified, and because it open source you verify it's de-identified enough for you. And if it isn't you can turn it off. So it's possible to do well, where "well" means gets you the data you without pissing off the users. Most proprietary don't bother to do it well for whatever reason. But they should be careful: it a big factor in diving things like Home Assistant, Linux Desktop and now this, apparently.

speed_spread 3y ago

Because it's never just for engineering purposes anymore. Marketing departments are CRAZY about consumer data of any kind and you can be assured the value of such collected data will be maximized on the information exchange market. Advertisers pay good money for trustable data streams, which can be essentially de-anonymized with enough cross correlation between sources. A GPU happens to be a good place to capture user activity, since from the screen buffer you can tell what website they visit, what videos they watch and what games they play. This stuff is rather hush hush not to scare people but it's also well documented and certainly not an unfounded conspiracy. Its also why Europeans have adopted far reaching privacy laws (GDPR), their industries don't rely on consumer surveillance the way Americans have developed for the last decades.

fragmede 3y ago

at the very least, crash reporting.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

Apple, which collects a lot of telemetry, made privacy a tenet of their brand, and they've successfully conflated the two in the mind of a layperson. Separately, most telemetry would tell stories like, "This project is a failure." Little incentive for people to adopt it. Then again, most OSS is ordered by the mania of its programmer-creators, not product or engineering quality informed by telemetry. Maybe in a Darwinian way, we only have the OSS that can thrive without telemetry and reactive product and engineering decisions.

rstuart4133 3y ago
Debian, RedHat and Firefox do have telemetry. Not a lot, but enough to prove it is possible to do it in a way that doesn't piss most people off. Naturally the way they collect it is open source, it's largely de-identified, and because it open source you verify it's de-identified enough for you. And if it isn't you can turn it off. So it's possible to do well, where "well" means gets you the data you without pissing off the users. Most proprietary don't bother to do it well for whatever reason. But they should be careful: it a big factor in diving things like Home Assistant, Linux Desktop and now this, apparently.