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Comment by spacemanspiff01 | Hacker News Reader

Would there be a way to do the stats gathering on device, then once every few months send a popup with statistics?

Not sure what bias it adds

"hey, we make this app, and we care about privacy, here is the information we have gathered over your usage for the past month, can we send this to ourselves, so that we can use it to improve the app?"

And then show human readable form of what data was collected.

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Just as a reference of existing implementations of this: This is essentially how Valve/Steam collects hardware details from users/clients. Every now and then, a popup appears asking the user if they'd like to participate in the "Hardware Survey", together with all the data that would be submitted if they accept.

Seems to me like a great implementation.

The podcast app I use, AntennaPod (far better for me than other apps, available on F-Droid, no affiliation!) just gave me a local-only year in review. I thought it was a great touch, and would be happy to have then shared the data from that with the app's makers.

You'd still have extremely biased data - people who blindly click OK on every pop up are not representative of your typical user; people who get nightmares after hearing the word "telemetry" and will gather the pitchforks if they hear any hint of will always refuse, but depending on your app, might be your typical user (e.g. for self-hosted picture sync and catalogue, who is the target audience - people who don't trust Apple/Google/Amazon/Dropbox to store their images privately)

I do find myself on the “private first” side…but also keep in mind that those who grab for pitchforks in defense of privacy aren’t a representative sample of the typical user either. (A purely statistical statement).

It’s very easy to confuse ‘loud protest from a small minority’ and the majority opinion. If a plurality of users chose to participate in an analytics program when asked and don’t care to protest phone-home activities when they’re discovered, then that’s where the majority opinion likely lies.

> people who blindly click OK on every pop up are not representative of your typical user

You could unbias the data by including the metric determining how long did it took them to click "Ok" and whether they actually reviewed the data before agreeing.

This sort of sounds like the Steam Hardware Survey. They do not collect the data willy-nilly, they ask you every few months if you want to participate in a one-time check.

I have an incentive to see if the Linux desktop share has increased, so I usually run the survey for them to get my data point in. I also suppose the "gamer" crowed likes to show off how powerful their "rig" is, so I would imagine they commonly also run the survey for that reason as well.

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