this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.
To me, telemetry would be like a sofa company wanting to put some cameras in your home to see if you're using the sofa the way they thought you would. It just feels... off.
Imo, a simple opt-in crash report gets the job done. Technically it is telemetry, but a crash report is more justified than a "where have you clicked" report.
There's just no trust in companies to not sell my data. I cannot trust Microsoft nor Google nor any other company to not sell my data, having seen the shenanigans every single company is willing to pull off to get a cent more a year.
Oddly the "where you clicked" report does drive decisions for updates. We (as a developer) use that information to drive UI decisions and determine which flows are more important and should be more easily available
Yes, and it makes sense that it would, and I'd happily give such data to developers I trust to make the programs I love better.
However, that same click data (maybe with some how-long-have-you-looked-at-this data) can definitely be used to target ads at me, which in my book is not okay. And as I said in my comment before, it's really difficult (at least for me) to trust companies.