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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

The information from people that explicitly opt-in would have given them the same insight.

> That's why I personally choose to leave telemetry on in applications that I trust

The problem is that when I have to "leave it on" rather than explicitly enable it then it's no longer an application I trust.

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The opt-in information would be skewed to the point of uselessness though right, thanks to extreme correlation? In fact, the non-opt out is probably pretty skewed itself so some wrong data driven decisions are inevitable.

There's a third, seldom-discussed alternative to opt-in and opt-out: no default.

On first launch or after a set period, show a non-dismissable dialog asking users to choose between the two, with no default option selected, so you can't just click through.

This strikes me as the best compromise between respect for user privacy and acknowledging that data collection can be useful, with the trade-off that some users will choose not to use the software/website rather than decide on an option (thus, 'no default' must be used sparingly).

That's still opt-in because the user elects to submit their telemetry data, even though they didn't seek out the setting.

It is opt-in, but typically both opt-in and out-out in these sorts of contexts refer to what happens in the absence of user input.

In that context opt-in has a bit of an issue with people even knowing it exists, not to mention caring enough to go find the option to opt-in, and then doing so. This route will, for better or worse, produce a very self-selected group. The proposal above is a way to maintain the benefits of opt-in (namely, consent) while trying to improve the quality of the group.

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