| > You can ask people for feedback (yes that is still a thing) That's not very reliable. It's quite common behavior that people give feedback only when they are not happy so you can get feedback like "this is horrible" although it still works nicely for the silent 99%. > or run user testing sessions (yes that used to be a thing too but seemingly not anymore when we look at the quality of modern software). Difficult to do for projects with $0 budget. I'm also interested in the long term (experienced) users behavior which is not possible with such testing sessions. > That heatmap thing will also at least leak my IP address, software version and a persistent UID that will allow the backend server (whether self-hosted, or powered by a nasty ad-tech company like Google analytics) to keep a log of my IP changes and usage patterns. * IP address - I don't care about your IP, that does not give me any useful info * software version - sure, I'd like to know which version you run. Is that really privacy violation though? * persistent UID - that's a matter of discussion, for me what's important is behavior within one session, connecting several sessions is not so important and I could do without it, so no persistent UID Each of these items could be a matter of discussion - it would be nice to move the discussion from "all telemetry is literally evil" to "what's acceptable to collect?". |
> I'm also interested in the long term (experienced) users behavior which is not possible with such testing sessions.
Is it not possible to reach out to those users and invite them to such a session in exchange of $$$?
> I don't care about your IP, that does not give me any useful info
True but some malicious third-parties might care, whether it's the analytics service itself (Google Analytics comes to mind) or even a law enforcement request to capture/access such data. You are basically creating a potential liability for the user; some people might not want the software to phone home for certain reasons and I think the default should always be safe so telemetry is "off" by default.
There's also the issue that telemetry is typically opaque and the user has no visibility or control over what is sent, so out of an abundance of caution they opt out. I think a good improvement would be to queue all the telemetry data locally, and then periodically ask the user to review, edit/redact & send it if they want to. Apple has done it relatively well there where if an app crashes they allow you to review the report before sending it, and I actually send these the majority of the time (unless it's a process dealing with sensitive data) despite having OS-level telemetry disabled.