>I ask the folks on HN who constantly criticise the collection of such telemetry, what did I lose as a user when Firefox collected this anonymised data? More importantly, how would you have made a decision here without the data? Intuition? (I’d request that no one reply with platitudes like “with enough data nothing is anonymous” and “you’re making a nothing-to-hide argument”)
You don't need telemetry to find out that notifications get abused like that.
No but you need telemetry to find out how users react to abusive notifications and how they interact with websites where they do genuinely want notifications from. You can't just guess that.
>you need telemetry to find out how users react to abusive notifications
You need telemetry to find out how users react to abusive notifications? Wow. I know that A/B testing is in vogue, but can’t they just use some common sense?
People despise abusive notification prompts.
People despise abusive ___location prompts.
People despised abusive popups to the point that every browser blocks them and websites started emulating popups via CSS to keep abusing their users (hi Medium!).
You need telemetry to find out how users
react to abusive notifications?
I run an ad blocker, so my perception of notifications is they're used for things like breaking news notifications on news websites [1]. That's not a feature I personally need, but 24 hour news channels exist so presumably someone feels they need regular news updates.
So no, it's not obvious to me everyone dislikes notification requests, even if I have them all blocked myself.
If you let curmudgeon developers like me dictate products' features sets based on intuition, there'd be no HTML e-mail, no third-party cookies, no WebGL, no emojis, no WebUSB.... :)
When is a notification prompt abusive? What rule do you need to distinguish a non-abusive prompt (for example a chat program wanting the ability to notify you or a GPS-related map on a website) vs an abusive prompt (newswebsite wanting to spam you or a tracking tool using GPS).
Common sense doesn't work here because everyone has a different perception of when these prompts become abusive or unwanted. Mozilla uses the data collected to determine how they can establish a rule to distinguish between abusive prompts and non-abusive prompts.
How users react to them is a good indicator if the prompt was abusive or not, most people will decline abusive prompts and accept good ones.
A simple "wait until first DOM interaction" will likely be not sufficient since a simple click on a text would then create the prompt. With more data you can determine a better rule.
That people despise these prompts is fairly obvious and exactly why Mozilla is collecting the data; they want to help people by establishing a good common ground rule for these notifications to be automatically blocked.
Unfortunately we are living in the world where the common sense is wrecked. People do complain if abusive notifications are blocked and websites are rendered unusable as a result, though it is completely the fault of websites! Keep in mind that browser vendors are trying to solve multivariate equations that involve users, web developers, companies, abusers and crackers...
You don't need telemetry to find out that notifications get abused like that.