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Telemetry

storybook.js.org

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Re: Telemetry

#61

Post by denton-scratch »

tilne wrote: post #17

I don’t mean to dismiss the importance of users owning and controlling their data, but isn’t telemetry a valid tool for software projects to gain valuable insights into how their product is being used and thus how to improve it? Yes, it can be (and, probably frequently is) abused. Yes there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry if a user desires for whatever reason. But I can’t help but feel this is posted in the s…

> isn’t telemetry a valid tool for software projects to gain valuable insights into how their product is being used and thus how to improve it?

"Valid" is doing a lot of work here.

Trivially, telemetry can provide insights. That's obvious. But how are users supposed to divine which insights the telemetry is supposed to provide? What if the data-collector doesn't know what they're looking for, and is just scraping everything?

> the spirit of “telemetry by default is bad” and I don’t really agree.

You're entitled to your view. My view is that telemetry (i.e. remotely observing what I do on my computer) is definitely "bad", if I don't consent to it explicitly.

Re: Telemetry

#62

Post by denton-scratch »

sf_rob wrote: post #29
tilne wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s fair. If the telemetry really is helpful to building a better product it should be an easy case to make to users.

If Telemetry is valuable, it's largely valuable to the degree it's representative. Opt-in sacrifices this and even a well optimized opt-in process won't prevent that. This is not to say that Telemetry should be opt-out, just that you place other justifications ahead of the usefulness of Telemetry (which is fine).

> Opt-in sacrifices this

You're right. Opt-in results in a survey population that is self-selected, and therefore largely meaningless. But compulsory participation in surveys is deeply objectionable; just because it's easy doesn't make it OK.

So you can't have representative telemetry that is also optional (for the user). So firms should stop trying to use telemetry, unless they're OK with telemetry data from a narrow pool of users, e.g. users of Beta versions of software.

Re: Telemetry

#63

Post by JohnFen »

iamacyborg wrote: post #39
larschdk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. To "opt" literally means "to make a choice". If the choice has been made for you, you are not "opted-in", you are in.

That’s being needlessly pedantic and being opted-in clearly details what has happened.

I could not disagree more. You can't "opt-in" someone else because they're not opting in at all. I think this is an important and meaningful distinction that we should call out, particularly since we're seeing more companies being deceptive on this point and trying to trick people through this confusing language.

Re: Telemetry

#64

Post by ptx »

goenning wrote: post #53
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telemetry is fine, it's just that under GDPR and co, it has to be opt-in; the user needs to make an informed decision on whether or not the app can collect and share telemetry.

If it truly is anonymous and there’s no PII or any persistent identifier (like a Machine ID) being collected, then GDPR doesn’t apply

The data is not likely to be truly anonymous in practice. Making sure it's truly anonymous takes more work and makes it less useful than not-quite-anonymous, so there's no incentive to do a good job of it.

Instead you end up with e.g. Microsoft's constant stream of "oops, we forgot to inform you of the data collection", "oops, we collected more data than intended", "oops, we sent it to our servers accidentally", "oops, it wasn't really anonymous" (e.g. because they simply hashed an ID to anonymize it), and so on.

Re: Telemetry

#65

Post by pimterry »

bluefishinit wrote: post #56
tilne wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s fair. If the telemetry really is helpful to building a better product it should be an easy case to make to users.

"Better products" don't spy on me. As a user, I don't want any information about my usage leaving my machine. In addition to privacy issues, this is now code that needs to be maintained, discussed, debugged... that has nothing to do with why I'm using the software. It's an entire feature set that costs money and time and technical complexity that provides literally no value to people using the tool for its intended p…

This is overly reductive.

All software - including Linux and vim - makes some choices that benefit the developer over the user. Any choice of technology or software architecture with consideration of developer ergonomics is doing this. Every app that ever shipped with a runtime abstraction (classes, dependency injection, testable code patterns, debug logging, etc) chose to make the software fractionally worse for the user, to help the developers to actually write the software.

There is a meaningful and debatable tradeoff in all such decisions, and it's not clear cut. It is often (but not always) sensible for software to include extra code that, yes, must be maintained etc, which exists purely to make the development process of the software more effective. All extra code like this is strictly speaking a bad thing for users when considered in isolation, but overall improvements in development processes (better software, fewer bugs, quicker fixes) mean it's a net benefit for the user in the end, hopefully.

In this case, these developers genuinely do think the telemetry will help them build better software. You may not agree! That's an interesting point to explore, but their opinion is that the maintenance cost is worthwhile for the benefits that this information will provide. They think that the downsides of telemetry will be outweighed by the resulting significant improvements for people using the tool for its intended purpose.

They may well be totally wrong - there's an interesting balance there that is worth discussing, in terms of concrete benefits and real-world costs. Reducing all DX code to "literally no value" though is unhelpful and misses the real discussion.

Re: Telemetry

#66

Post by iamacyborg »

JohnFen wrote: post #63
iamacyborg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s being needlessly pedantic and being opted-in clearly details what has happened.

I could not disagree more. You can't "opt-in" someone else because they're not opting in at all. I think this is an important and meaningful distinction that we should call out, particularly since we're seeing more companies being deceptive on this point and trying to trick people through this confusing language.

And yet the British data protection agency thinks you can via something called a soft opt-in.

Re: Telemetry

#67

Post by andrewmcwatters »

faichai wrote: post #49

Storybook is one of those projects, like Postman, that has completely lost the plot. It's unclear what objectives they are pursuing but in terms of developer experience they seem increasingly developer hostile. The CSF format is an unreadable joke and doesn't play that well with TypeScript, the number of plugins you need to do anything sane is ridiculous, and this telemetry story is a farce - open source should not s…

What should people use instead of Postman these days? It seems to still be the only decent client for testing particular protocols, like OAuth 2.0. There's no way I'm using curl for that.

Re: Telemetry

#68

Post by K0balt »

Keirmot wrote: post #9
K0balt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely can be interpreted to mean that the telemetry is opt-in, or that it is opt-out. (“Opt-in by default” is a double positive, a less common sibling of the dreaded double negative)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a double positive just a positive while a double negative is a positive? Opt-in by default: you are in You can’t not select opt-in: you are in

Yeah, this is more complex than a double positive isn’t it. Hmm.

“Opt in , by default” would seem to mean you have to opt in, unless some unnamed external condition was met, so normally you would have to choose to participate… which is the opposite of this case , where to NOT participate you must, by default, opt OUT. And if you do not you are automatically committed to participate.

Re: Telemetry

#69

Post by bluefishinit »

pimterry wrote: post #65
bluefishinit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Better products" don't spy on me. As a user, I don't want any information about my usage leaving my machine. In addition to privacy issues, this is now code that needs to be maintained, discussed, debugged... that has nothing to do with why I'm using the software. It's an entire feature set that costs money and time and technical complexity that provides literally no value to people using the tool for its intended p…

This is overly reductive. All software - including Linux and vim - makes some choices that benefit the developer over the user. Any choice of technology or software architecture with consideration of developer ergonomics is doing this. Every app that ever shipped with a runtime abstraction (classes, dependency injection, testable code patterns, debug logging, etc) chose to make the software fractionally worse for the…

> This is overly reductive.

No, as a user I really don't want my usage data leaving my machine. There is no justification worth that to me.

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