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even something as inane as "automatically report crashes to the developers so we can fix them quicker" or "tell us how many users are on each version so we can estimate the blast radius of some backward-incompatible change" would be categorized as tracking.Devil is in the details. Unless you are very careful, even a basic crash report may leak PII (commonly, through careless logging).
> Here's the problem: people are idiots.
I know what you're referring to, but I have a similarly broad and fractally detailed counter-generalization for you: companies are abusive. Their consider individual customers as cattle, to be exploited at scale. They will lie, cheat and steal at every opportunity, skirting close to the boundaries of what's legal, and considering occasional breaches into outright fraud as costs of doing business.
Yes, I know not all companies are like that - just like not all users are technically illiterate. But the general trend is obvious in both cases.
What this means is, I don't trust software companies. If a company asks me to opt into telemetry, with only a generic "help improve experience" blurb, I'm obviously going to say no. It would be stupid to agree; "help us improve the experience" is the single most cliché line of bullshit in the software industry. There's hardly a week without a story of "some well-known company selling data to advertisers". Introduction of GDPR revealed the true colors of the industry - behind each consent popup with more than two switches there is an abusive, user-hostile company feeding data to a network of their abusive partners. So sorry, you have to do better than tell me it's in the long-term benefit of the users - because every scoundrel says that too, and I have no way of telling you and them apart.
And now for the fractal details part:
> Idiocy never remains in isolation. If they refuse to update the app, then update Windows and it stops working, Users don't throw their hands up and say "oh well that's my bad". They don't complain to Microsoft. They complain to AppDevs.
Yes, idiocy on both ends. There's a reason why users refuse to update the app. It's because developers mix security patches, bugfixes, performance improvements, and "feature" updates in the same update stream - with the latter often being a downgrade from the POV of the user. I'm one of those people who keep auto-update disabled, because I've been burned too many times. I update on my own schedule now, because I can't trust the developers not to permanently replace my application with a more bloated, less functional version.
(Curiously, if usage telemetry is so useful, why software so often gets worse from version to version?)
Secondly, if the user updates Windows and your app stops working, it's most likely your fault. Windows cares deeply about not breaking end-user software, historically it bent over backwards to maintain compatibility even with badly written software. It's entirely reasonable to expect software on Windows to remain working after Windows updates, or even after switching major Windows version.
> Most developers just want to deliver a working project; telemetry enables that.
Telemetry does not enable that. Plenty of developers delivered working projects before telemetry was a thing. What enables delivery of working projects is care and effort. Telemetry is just a small component of that, a feature that gives the team some data that would otherwise require more effort to collect. Data that's just as easy to lead you astray as it is to improve your product.
> Giving users the ability to opt-out, maybe even fine-grained control over what kinds of telemetry is sent, is fantastic.
Yes, and all that except making the telemetry opt-in is even more fantastic. You want the data? Ask for it, justify your reasons for it, and give people reasons to trust you - because the average software company is absolutely not trustworthy.