As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.
To me, telemetry would be like a sofa company wanting to put some cameras in your home to see if you're using the sofa the way they thought you would. It just feels... off.
“90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”.
Imo, a simple opt-in crash report gets the job done. Technically it is telemetry, but a crash report is more justified than a "where have you clicked" report.
telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold
There's just no trust in companies to not sell my data. I cannot trust Microsoft nor Google nor any other company to not sell my data, having seen the shenanigans every single company is willing to pull off to get a cent more a year.
Oddly the "where you clicked" report does drive decisions for updates. We (as a developer) use that information to drive UI decisions and determine which flows are more important and should be more easily available
Yes, and it makes sense that it would, and I'd happily give such data to developers I trust to make the programs I love better.
However, that same click data (maybe with some how-long-have-you-looked-at-this data) can definitely be used to target ads at me, which in my book is not okay. And as I said in my comment before, it's really difficult (at least for me) to trust companies.
In general I agree, but users should be able to make that decision themselves. I do not understand why you can't turn off telemetry, when it would be trivial to offer that option and so few users would bother to use it.
How about shit breaking because everyone at some point is a bad programmer? Even Apple Music doesn’t work when I walk into the elevator until halfway through presumably because hitting play sets of a bunch of useless blocking network calls for music I have saved locally.
What those calls are, I can’t say for sure. Downloading artwork, license checks or telemetry. I’d venture to guess it’s the latter since music will play with placeholder artwork on a slow connection and license checks aren’t required if the subscription was recently validated (works offline for days).
But who really knows. I never bothered to inspect the traffic. The point is, if a company like Apple is creating such a crummy experience for a function so absurdly basic, you can imagine how easy and prevalent telemetry based user degradation is. Go browse the web with a tracker blocker and tell me it isn’t snappier.
PS: I’m also a programmer and collect error reports. So many developers will forego using connection pools, much less collect data with async api’s.
And let’s not even get into how telemetry is a shit tool that is misused 99.99% of the time and only used to surface popular features that aren’t necessarily good features only because we attach causation to every metric (x feature is highly used, therefore it must be good).
Yes, but maybe “reputable” isn’t the right word. Realistically, it’s anyone who would potentially face billions in a class-action lawsuit and could actually afford to pay up without going bankrupt. It’s just not worth the risk to getting a few extra $million to pull in telemetry data to the already expansive list of marketing data they collect and monetize.
For example, I would doubt that Hearthstone (Blizzard, revenue $8.7B) sells their app telemetry data. But I could definitely believe that Hill Climb Racer (Fingersoft, revenue $30M) does, or at least integrates it with ad targeting products.
A few things (and I enable it usually, for the record):
Not really the user's job to help you with anything especially related to your boss
"from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it," fuck man, this made me laugh. Good one
Policies get updated, companies are bought and sold, laws change, and most crucially of all, data gets leaked. It doesn't matter how airtight your asshole is puckered up or how many isolated networks are involved. It gets leaked. Leave the decision up to users about it and in particular maybe let them have full control of their networks.
That would be good, considered the user could actually have a choose to opt out the telemetry. Windows don't ask you about gathering data for telemetry or "other" reasons.