this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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People really need to kill that notion that telemetry is automatically bad. If the information they are collecting is minimal, as non-identifiable as possible and actually being used to help develop the browser, it's a good thing.
Yes, turbo nerds in the back, specially being opt-out, opt-in telemetry is pretty much useless for trying to understand the majority of your user base.
There is an actually moral alternative to opt-out that doesn't have the poor-sampling problem of opt-in: ask for consent explicitly.
It's the ideal solution morally-wise, but it still samples out a ton of users precisely because people are used to the idea of telemetry = bad
I wonder why users would have such a bias, other than their experience over the last 25 years.
I’m a developer. I side with the users on this.
And that's a good thing. Because that is the decision by the user. The freedom of choosing in opt in fashion is much more important than collecting some individual data for a specific use case of a specific company. Opt in is not just ideal solution morally-wise, its the best solution we have in general and every company should strife this solution. Plus the data should be presented before sending, so there is no ambiguity. Steam, a closed source program, does that in the best possible way.