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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

This is the correct way to handle it.

For single issues - yes. If you have a large deploy base that you can't easily talk to, aggregate reports which can give you don't easy correlation results are much better. For example https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/home/product/Firefox results in much more stability for FF users. Asking everyone would not be possible.

It's more "something crashed, can we send this information to help diagnose the problem? Here's a big textbox from which you can review what we're sending if you want".

Versus "screw you we're taking it anyway".

In some environments this is a massive compliance issue.

Funnily enough, my tab crashed opening the .net core bug linked and firefox has changed this to prompt users before sending the report.

Unfortunately it's still opt-out, doesn't show what data it's sharing and looks to be purposefully misleading, so no info from me.

> firefox has changed this to prompt users before sending the report

Wasn't it always that way? I remember those opt-in crash dialogs from a long time ago – I think they already had them in Netscape, or at least the (pre-Firefox) Mozilla suite.

No, it's not. Unless used very sparingly, it makes for a shitty user experience.

I'd risk a guess that the average user doesn't have any problem with aggregate, anonymized data being collected for statistical and debugging purposes. A lot of people here on HN do and they like to extrapolate that to the whole society, but it's a stretch.

The average user clicks through privacy agreements and contracts without looking. It's up to us to promote good behaviour by technology vendors rather than say I told you so later which is the current status quo.

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