[shadowgovt]

"Deserve" is complicated. To a first approximation that ignores a lot of details... What have they done to "deserve" it? They didn't buy it. They aren't making the process of figuring out what they want particularly easy.

People who don't show up to vote also "deserve" a good government by virtue of being people who have to live in a governed society. It's harder to make one for them if the system for selecting leaders is missing their input, regardless of what they deserve.

Popping out of the government analogy and back to software, power users are also in a position where they are more capable of adjusting their experience to suit their needs. All things being equal, a company with finite resources to develop software should dedicate those resources to assisting the non-power users more often than power users.

[feanaro]

While you argue your case, that one has to vocalise if one wants something, well, you are still ignoring the basic want of not having your privacy violated and the fact that you can vocalise something willfully, without it being spied away from you. I'm also extremely suspicious of the suggestion that this is something only power users would want.

[shadowgovt]

You can certainly vocalize something willfully. But the people who don't have to do any vocalization at all and are generating megabytes to gigabytes of data on how the application is used by their mere use of it are going to always have a default stronger voice than people who bother to show up on message boards to voice specific concerns.

[feanaro]

I actually agree that if you are willing to ignore privacy concerns and a potentially large part of your userbase, then you can simply send megabytes to gigabytes of telemetry and pretend that is the best you could have done and that you have the best data. I'm simply saying that's not a good idea.

[shadowgovt]

a) It's not a large part of the user base who switches off telemetry and they have the telemetry to know that

b) for being "not a good idea", it's pretty much industry standard now for everything from business software to video games.

[feanaro]

> a) It's not a large part of the user base who switches off telemetry and they have the telemetry to know that

So you're claiming that it is typical for software with telemetry support to ignore your choice and still send telemetry about you turning off telemetry? That sounds wrong, but I cannot say I investigated this deeply.

> b) for being "not a good idea", it's pretty much industry standard now for everything from business software to video games.

As I understood the discussion, we were in fact discussing whether this is a good idea and whether it makes sense, so I think it's fair game to comment on it. As for it being an industry standard, that sounds like an overgeneralization. It is certainly not typical of software I use.

[shadowgovt]

> So you're claiming that it is typical for software with telemetry support to ignore your choice and still send telemetry about you turning off telemetry? That sounds wrong, but I cannot say I investigated this deeply.

No; I'm saying missing data leaves holes that can be measured. They know, for example, how many people have downloaded Chrome and how many daily Chrome users they get at google.com (because Chrome will still send a valid UA string if it has telemetry turned off). They can estimate how many users have telemetry turned off from those signals to a pretty decent degree of accuracy; certainly enough to know whether telemetry is telling them about 90% of users of 30%.

For (b), I'm curious what software you use. It's pretty standard in games, online apps, and business software. It's absent in a lot of open-source (mostly because a lot of open-source lacks a centralized vendor who would be willing to pay the cost to collect and interpret that data to improve the software).