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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

> Ask Users First

The answer is always "No" to telemetry in every case.

If it's the case, then take the hint.

I can't believe how much BS we have to hear about consensual sex these days to the point people are suggesting contract before making love, and yet the virtual signalers in the valley can't still see the problem with forcing people to be spied upon even when told to piss off.

Maybe too many new web framework turn over also burnt out their common sense?

Silicon Valley still seems to have a huge problem with the concept of user consent and giving users meaningful choices. If "Silicon Valley" was a human being, it would be that creepy guy in the club hitting on everyone, saying "Do you want to be my girlfriend? [YES] [Ask Me Again Later]"

That would be a great short movie.

You could also show the same person, 10 minutes prior, telling their locksmith they should say "main-key" instead of "master-key" because that's inappropriate, otherwise they won't call them for more gigs.

> it would be that creepy guy in the club hitting on everyone, saying "Do you want to be my girlfriend? [YES] [Ask Me Again Later]"

And somehow the DJ is always playing "What is Love?" when it happens.

>people are suggesting contract before making love

I would unironically require this simply because the legal liability risks are too bloody high otherwise.

Not that I would get myself into such a situation in the first place. In this day and age there are many other avenues of entertaining oneself without the ridiculous liability risks.

I disagree. For example, Jetbrains asked me nicely if they can enable telemetry for their IDEs. So I did. Windows didn’t ask. So I use O&O ShutUp to make it stop.

The very act of asking at least shows SOME modicum of respect for the user, which is a big sign in their favor.

If they try to hide it? Huge red flag.

Assuming that's true, then you can't collect telemetry. What's the alternative? "We're going to spy on you against your will because it's profitable for us."?

Pay for the program to stop spying on you?

Or use a much better program that doesn't spy on you, (FOSS Software)

Free and open source software is not a solution to privacy violating telemetry BS. Example: Firefox

Although it is non-trivial work that you need to do with each update, but you can still remove all telemetry from Firefox through `about:config` tweaks

lots of paid software has telemetry you cannot disable

And with FOSS software you can remove the telemetry.

> Pay for the program to stop spying on you?

When has that ever been an option?

I don't think this is always true. When I get an error message or some sort of error while using a program on my private PC I don't mind sending the error code and telemetry data to the devs, because it hopefully helps them to find and hopefully fix errors in the software I am using and therefore is a win-win situation in my opinion at least.

It is always true that you should ask. In this case, you have no qualms living with opt in, versus opt out. In this case, you can live with the minority rule [0] with no impact to your function.

[0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Amos (Rust's fasterthanlime) has pointed out that opt-in causes a problem which the "Eh, they can always opt in if they care" crowd don't spot until it's too late.

The telemetry is collected at time T, and your decision that you care must come before time T if it's to have any effect on the outcomes. After the telemetry is collected, and decisions are taken based on that telemetry, it's too late to opt in.

This reflect a common problem with humans that what they don't like is regret, but what we offer them as a fix is informed consent -- it turns out what they wanted to be informed about was really whether they would in future regret it, which we cannot know.

Now, as a democracy we "fix" this by just deciding that even if you refuse to participate in the process we don't get to claim that your interests don't matter. That feels like a reasonable price to pay for very important decisions like "Should we build a freeway across this land occupied by the people from this weird religious sect?" but it feels way out of proportion for something like, "Should I add more animated Emoji reactions to version X, or should I work on enabling the text-to-speech feature in group chats as well as one-to-one ?"

Laws like GDPR can help organisations stick to collecting only what they actually needed to know and not just "Everything because why not" - GDPR is why not. Did you just collect the full name of every user? You'd better have a damn good explanation of why you did that. Whether user has <4GB, 4GB-8GB or 8GB+ of RAM? Very easy to justify.

If they do no (which they don’t, by the way: often they’re happy you asked) what makes you think it is acceptable to do anyways?

I would just rather pay for the program to remove telemetry data than accepting to spy on my device.

I believe this is a better choice for developers and users.

In this worldview, it is the Boss who makes the Worker work, because the worker is lazy and cheats at every opportunity. It is closely related to "objectifying the Other" where character traits and behavior patterns are cast upon the Other in interaction, without regard to detail.

but what if the Boss is lazy and cheats too?

I think a slightly dark pattern of making a "Yes" more visible (or default on enter in a CLI like Y/n) is an acceptable compromise. Informed consent, but biased.

How can you say it's informed consent if the obvious outcome is that more people click "yes" than actually want to click "yes"?

Indeed, as it should be. You should always ask the user when you collect their data, for each transaction. If your software then is annoying as it performs, that's on you as the developer. Fix your processes.

Your test harness should cover edge cases. Invest in that, versus the externalized cost of collecting telemetry.

Your users are not your labrats. Quit pushing your testing costs on to them.

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