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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't human interaction errors be left up to the user to report, as opposed to software sending sensitive information to a third-party?

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No data on this but instinctively it seems, given alternatives, most people abandon some buggy software rather than patiently reporting problems and waiting for it to get better.

Yeah. User reporting has a very obvious and very strong survivorship bias. Plus the people who take the time to send in a report are a rather small niche, so you have pretty strong bias even if you exclude people who leave.

Always-on metrics are massively higher quality data. They don't collect the same kind of data in many cases, but they can reveal a lot of things that never get reported. They also don't suffer from the well-established pattern of people not accurately reporting their own behavior when asked / polled (stronger when asking about future behavior, but it applies in all cases).

In production, agreed. In beta, I’ll accept it. I feel that the term beta gets abused a lot, but in what I believe is it’s proper meaning, there are a lot of inherent factors both parties are agreeing to; increased risk of error and data loss, and debugging flags that generate more data for the singular purpose of improving the product. That’s exactly what should be in the privacy policy and explicitly stated upon install. Anything short of that puts me firmly in the hell-no category with you.

With you here on this. Telemetry is a really important concern and I get why people don't like it, but fundamentally the expectations on a beta product surely have to be different in that. The thing is still in development. T

I'm with you on not sending data, but have you ever read user reports? IF you get any (most won't report) they likely won't have enough information to reproduce or fix.

Automated Error reporting does has it uses.

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