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Comment by valdiorn | Hacker News Reader

honest question; as someone who is currently building an audio application which has telemetry, how else would I discover bugs or problems that might be affecting my users, if I can't upload crash reports, etc. ? I mean, I'll do my best to test before releasing, but when a user contacts support, describing some weird behaviour, without telemetry I have zero information to work from, and basically have to resort to "stacktrace or GTFO"... wouldn't it be nice if that stacktrace was anonymously uploaded and I had some idea of how prevalent the issue was, and maybe there's some information in there to help me fix the problem, and make my users happy?

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My personal take is that this type of telemetry is fine. I just don't want to give potentially unbounded, hard-to-audit access to my telemetry data over to the likes of Google. If your application provides a means of learning _what_ is getting sent, and you make it opt-in, and you only send it to infrastructure you completely control (within reason, I'm not going to complain if it's a VPS or something), then there shouldn't really be any controversy.

I don't hate Google. I just don't want my desktop applications to even be capable of telling Google about my computer usage if I can at all help it.

Save the past n crash logs on the local machine for the user to inspect, and allow the user to turn it off/clear them. When there's a crash, offer to send the most recent crash log.

Similarly, use a double-file-buffered stack trace of the last n minutes of function calls. If the user selects "I just experienced a bug" in the Help menu, offer to send the most recent stack traces.

I haven't managed a big project before, but is spying on your users really the only way to handle bug monitoring? Couldn't people just...report bugs when they happen? Submit logs? You know, voluntarily? Hey, you could even have a version with telemetry, quarantined off by itself with a bunch of warnings that people can download and run if they want to help, similar to non-release builds. But forcing it on everyone, even if it's "off by default," is no good.

Why can't the user send you the crash report if he wants to?

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