It's a good idea as long as they actually have some good motivation for capturing data. If it's just "we're curious" then I don't think that is good enough.
The design of transparent telemetry
71–74 of 74 posts
Re: The design of transparent telemetry
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most users don’t want to send telemetry. But most users also want a system built by people who understand how users use it.
You can achieve 99% of that by using your own product and talking to your customers, and everybody managed to do just that and to make useful products long before telemetry became ubiquitous.
People don’t know how many cache misses they had, or what IO exceptions and retries led to their poor experience. They know they had a poor experience.
No one will afford to make interviews on the scale of making good statistics.
Knowing when I can sunset support for a specific OS or hardware (e.g screen resolution) would require a huge amount of expensive surveying.
The telemetry that tells me 20% of my users use 4K screens now literally costs single digit dollars per month. It costs the same as one or a handful of “talking to users”. More importantly, you don’t need to waste precious time when talking to users with asking them what driver version or screen resolution they have. Because of course users are spoken to. Telemetry isn’t instead of talking to users. It’s so that a) you can focus your user conversion on human focused things and b) so that you cover a wider group than you could ever afford talking to.
It’s better to be up front with the fact that software does anonymous telemetry and prudent that it actually is good (anonymous, and not using excessive resources).
Re: The design of transparent telemetry
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but the official Go tooling is developed and managed by Google; the decision makers and core developers are Google employees. Go is deeply died to Google. I'm not comfortable asking my users to send telemetry information to Google. The exact details aren't very important. People can make their own decisions about whether they're fine with it or not, but I'm not going to push people towar…
If that's the way you feel, then stop using Go. No need to make misleading statements because you have some gear to grind every time telemetry comes up
What the... ?
Telling someone to stop using an OSS programming language, because they like the language without spyware is a pretty shitty take. :(
Re: The design of transparent telemetry
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a Nobel Prize in Economics awarded specifically for recognizing that things "disabled trivially" generally won't be, and this is a fully generic method of denying people their agency. See [0]. Opt-out, in most cases, is malicious, and you only think about introducing it when you're trying to make a change that leaves your users worse off. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Thaler#Nobel_Prize
That’s true, but there is another side to this same coin — people won’t do the right thing if it’s opt-in. Organ donation’s percentages are the two ends of the spectrum simply depending on opt-in/out. I’m of course not comparing telemetry to organ donation, but I do feel that the problem is often overblown and is not that big of a deal. There is not much evil in trying to find out how many people used your toolings a…
> people won’t do the right thing if it’s opt-in
Yes they will. They'll leave it off, which is how it should be. ;)