> Unpopular opinion but, is opt-outtable telemetry that bad?
In its current incarnation, yes.
From what I've seen, telemetry has simply replaced quality assurance and proper design, and I don't like it.
It's hard to put it into words, exactly, but I'm old enough now to realise that using primarily statistics to drive high-level decisions inevitably leads to a general crapification of everything. It naturally leads to dark patterns, to gamification, to making things addictive... sorry... "engaging". It sneaks in prejudices, and ossifies the status quo. Worst of all, it tends to drag everything down to the lowest common denominator, to the left side of the bell curve. Mass appeal is appeal to the average and below-average person.
This type of viewer-feedback design is why every Hollywood movie is now so formulaic. Must have orange-blue contrast poster. Must have a love story. Must have uplifting moment. Must have plucky ethnic characters. It has become revolting slop for the masses to consume in bulk.
Software design is no different. I want quality, I want inspired software that is cohesive, fit for purpose, and will teach me something. Instead it is being purposefully lowered to the level of the average, computer-illiterate person in order to be more "accessible".
As a random example, I was infuriated when Microsoft announced that they're deprecating the Windows 7 version of the backup tool from a future Windows 10 release because their telemetry shows that most home users don't use it much.
Who. Gives. A. Fuck. what some grandma does or doesn't do with their worthless PC and its virus-riddled hard drive with no valuable data on it?
Do you? I don't. Microsoft shouldn't.
But oh no, their telemetry says Grandpa and Grandma don't use VHDX-based image backup enough, so it's go to go.
I use it regularly because it can back create disk-image backups of a running machine at a button press. It reads the source disk linearly block-by-block, and hence I can use it to back up -- or restore -- the 450 GB of tiny source code files on my work laptop in just 15 minutes! If my laptop dies, I can just attach the backup disk to another computer with Hyper-V and directly boot the latest image file. No need to even restore.
This is amazing engineering! It reuses the built-in Volume Shadow Service (VSS) engine to take the backup, so it's practically free code for Microsoft, but... nope. Sorry. The "people" have spoken. Less than 0.1% of the user base clicked this icon in the last 12 months, so clearly I'm wrong and the masses are right.