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as a software dev you know that soft anonymous telemetry of how a user use what you do is very valuable to make decision on how to make things....

I wish there was way everywhere to collect with privacy and being accepted by user as not something we want to spie people on... but as always there is (a lot ) of abuse in this area so this may never going to happen




Well if my only choice is 'send arbitrary information on what I'm doing' and 'don't send any information' I'm always going to pick the latter.

Has anyone tried just showing people the information the application would like to report back? I know it's been tried with crash reports.


> as a software dev you know that soft anonymous telemetry of how a user use what you do is very valuable to make decision on how to make things....

No, actually, on account of being a software dev, I know that telemetry is actively counterproductive when making decisions on how to make things. It makes your decisions more wrong, not less.


would you care to explain why is this ?

even as OSS software maker, would you start working on features because they are "cool" or a bunch of people yelling^H^Hasking for it on twitter?


> would you care to explain why is this?

I assume it's yet another case of the fallacy of revealed preferences.

If you look at what people actually do, any insight into what they want is confounded by environmental effects (eg, they'd prefer to use feature A, but feature A is missing or inconvenient to access, so they end up mostly using feature B), selection bias (feature A is most useful to precisely the people who know how to turn off or deliberately break telemetry), and other issues (A/B testing confirms that people have a revealed preference for clicking on animated icons (because they're trying to make the fucking thing stop squirming in their peripheral vision while they're trying to concentrate on something else)).

(Talking with users is definitely possible (usually easy) to screw up, but I have yet to encounter any evidence that it's possible to not screw up telemetry-based design decisions by any means other than ignoring the telemetry.)




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