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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

Yeah.

Companies should be transparent about the data they collect and how they anonymize it – and should be easily disabled if needed if you need serious privacy, as is possible that some resourceful actor could de-anonymize the information somehow. But this kind of data is not necessarily harmful.

People disabling telemetry will often be the same ones complaining about "poorly written applications and company X should know better". Well they don't because you disabled telemetry, now the company or organization has no data to improve anything, be it performance, crashes or even UI. Bug reports are not enough.

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This is the sort of argument that gets thrown around often, and I disagree completely --- data collection should always be opt-in, not opt-out. Normalising the invasion of privacy and subverting the default expectation thereof is harmful to individual freedom.

Respect the users: let them tell you what they want, when they want, and how they want. Don't paternalistically monitor them or tell them what they should/"really" want.

Respect the users: let them tell you what they want, when they want, and how they want.

To expand on this a bit, the past several years advertisers and attention brokers have focused on the difference between stated preferences and observed behavior, optimizing for the latter. Unfortunately it seems optimizing for observed behavior amplifies the worst of our base instincts, so even if it improves the bottom line in the short term, we are degrading our civilization in the process.

It's possible a similar discrepancy between behavior and intention exists in UI telemetry. Ask people what they want when at their best, don't optimize for measurements of them at their worst.

Firefox is not transparent enough? Their privacy policy is pretty straightforward and there's a ton more technical details on the wiki.

Yet organizations went decades making fantastic and ever-improving software without telemetry. What changed? Why would telemetry suddenly become a basic requirement for improvement?

Software is generally a lot more complex these days, and telemetry data is needed to stay competitive and keep improving.

Using Firefox as an example, look at how many improvements they have made over the last 5 years. I'm not here to argue whether we need these feature or if Firefox 2 was the last version of Firefox that we needed. Firefox (or Chrome, or whatever) wouldn't look as great as it does today without lots of data.

On the other hand Mozilla has frequently quoted telemetry as the reason for removing niche or power-user features, for example Tab Groups and Themes. "Low usage" in both cases.

So telemetry doesn't always improve the user experience.

Power users disable telemetry.

> Software is generally a lot more complex these days, and telemetry data is needed to stay competitive and keep improving.

If violating user's privacy is your way to stay competitive, then that's your personal problem. You have no right to spy on everyone just because you have problems staying relevant.

I don’t know — my Pentium used to run software that crashed constantly, corrupted files, and was in hindsight horrendously insecure. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where software quality was magically excellent?

> Well they don't because you disabled telemetry, now the company or organization has no data to improve anything

No.

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