[Despoisj]

As a former Kindle developer, I can say that most of what's mentioned in this article are metrics used to understand how the features are used (bookmarks, highlights, dictionnary, etc.), how much they are used, and in which country. This allows the teams to focus on features that are actively used, and sometimes lead to discontinuing features that see little to no use. Hope that helps.

[breakfastduck]

As many people here have echoed - this boils down to the fact the data is being captured without an opt out.

I don't doubt the developers are using it for 'morally acceptable' purposes, but I don't trust Amazon not to abuse that data later down the line!

I really don't feel that anyone needs to know precisely what pages I have viewed in a specific book.

[falcolas]

The kindle e-readers do offer an opt-out from the metrics collection. It can be triggered from the website or the device itself.

That it's an opt-out and not opt-in is not a good thing, but it can be opted out of on the e-readers.

[breakfastduck]

OK well that's something. An opt-in would be preferred but that's much better than nothing.

Is it confirmed though that these network requests definitely stop after that is switched?

[gavreh]

What are the steps to do this?

[ptman]

https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/deviceprivacy... ?

[zxcb1]

Does not work, can you point to a tutorial? And does this include the Kindle app?

[xena]

On my kindle Oasis:

- Go to the homescreen

- Open the hamburger menu

- Tap settings

- Device Options

- Advanced Options

- Privacy

- Disable

[andrewmutz]

That data allows users to pick up where they left off as they change devices.

I rely on that regularly as I use both my phone and a Kindle device to read books.

[breakfastduck]

So you should turn those features on. It doesn't mean I should have to tolerate it by default.

[PeterStuer]

At least for EU citizens the GDPR requires this to be an opt-in, with the option to decline without service degradation.

[mc32]

Agree. Opt out at the minimum. How did software and features ever get done before telemetry?

Efficiency is not always the best humanistic approach. So maybe they support unused features and maybe they let some features wither that lots of people like. Maybe it would make things cost a little more. I think people would be ok with some of those inefficiencies.

[ksk]

>How did software and features ever get done before telemetry?

IMHO, The software today is miles better at UX.

[breakfastduck]

Is that because of telemetry or just the field developing naturally, though?

[ksk]

No, I don't think its just due to telemetry, I think its a combination of multiple factors as you suggested.

[paulcole]

The opt out is don't buy a Kindle.

[hohohn]

That's how every company rationalizes the mass collection of user data. "Oh lets collect many terabytes of every user-action in case we need to one day discontinue a feature".

It's a book. You don't need to collect and track every fucking action I do to find out if your stupid highlighter is being used in Poland.

[jjcon]

Whether you like it or not this collection does lead to better products - that is why you think every company does it because those that don’t usually die out. Understanding your users is vitally important.

Privacy LARPers are a tiny segment of the market, the average person doesn’t really care if their ‘usage of the highlighter function is tracked’

[neiman]

> Privacy LARPers are a tiny segment of the market, the average person doesn’t really care if their ‘usage of the highlighter function is tracked’

If so, why don't they loudly advertise the data collection and do it only with opt-in?

It's not that the average user doesn't care if they're tracked, it's that they're not aware that they're being tracked.

[jjcon]

You think companies should loudly advertise something people don’t care about? That doesn’t make sense.

Plenty of companies are quite transparent about their data collection practices (set up an Apple device recently?)

Most people are aware of data collection, they care more about functionality though.

[shadowprofile77]

>Plenty of companies are quite transparent about their data collection practices (set up an Apple device recently?)

I have not, not recently, but what you say is simply bullshit. They're "transparent" in that they give you a ToS loaded with legalese that they know you couldn't easily read through to find just how much and where they're squeezing your life for information to store. In cases where they simplify this with some less legalistic declarations of data use, what you often see there are numerous weasel words and phrases to very ambiguously describe what's being done. You know, things like "We MAY collect some information for the sake of improving user experience" and blah blah....

Then of course, there's the outright lying, which also happens, in which big tech companies simply fail to mention some types of data collection anywhere (the Amazon Alexa voice recordings being listened to by humans is a good example iof this)

[jjcon]

This isn’t buried in a tos or legalese

https://www.groundctl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/csm_IMG...

Apple prompts you for each piece of data collection during the setup of an iOS device (and lets you choose if you want to share).

[neiman]

> You think companies should loudly advertise something people don’t care about?

It's not what I said.

[jjcon]

> why don't they loudly advertise the data collection

[rumanator]

> If so, why don't they loudly advertise the data collection and do it only with opt-in?

But they do.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yg70ojfWXnk

[neiman]

The video is about synch, while the conversation is about "collection does lead to better products" -> i.e, analytics.

[rumanator]

What do you believe syncing means? This discussion talks about whispersync reporting last page read and most recent page read events. What do you think that's supposed to do?

[danShumway]

> Privacy LARPers

This is an unnecessarily denigrating term at this point in the conversation. It's not LARPing to want to be able to read a book or take notes without being tracked.

[jjcon]

> It's not LARPing to want to be able to read a book or take notes without being tracked.

Absolutely agree but it is LARPing to pretend this collection is for anything but improving a product. Nobody is out to get you and nobody particularly cares how often you specifically turn the page (the data is useful in aggregate).

[danShumway]

Kindle's privacy FAQ[0] says:

> We also use it to develop and improve products and features for all our customers and to gain insights into how our products are being used, assess customer engagement, identify potential quality issues, analyze our business, and customize marketing offers.

Targeted marketing is, in itself, something that's reasonable for someone to want to block regardless of whether or not there's a mustached villain tracking you. Privacy is about more than stalkers, it's about the effects of data usage. For some people, targeted advertising is a harm regardless of whether or not the company knows their name.

To go a step farther, I also don't understand why it's LARPing to be worried about a company who is actively being investigated for misusing seller data.

I bring this up every time that one of these threads/stories gets posted, but there's (appologies, but for lack of a better word) some kind of weird gaslighting that always happens in these situations. Before it broke that Echo and Siri queries were sometimes listened to by 3rd-party contractors, if I had posted that suspicion on HN people would have called me paranoid. Once the story broke, the argument then shifted to, "well of course they're doing that, how else would you improve the service?" That kind of thinking applies to Amazon as well.

I don't know that it's likely, but I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that Amazon might use this information in the future to help target pirates, change book rankings on their store, perform highly targeted advertising and book recommendations, or turn it over during government subpoenas. Those are completely reasonable usages that their privacy policy leaves them permission to do.

Similarly, I don't know that it's likely, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that this information might get sent to 3rd parties with less responsible data practices, or that employees might be given direct access to it in an unobfuscated form[1]. It's not something I'm losing sleep over, but I wouldn't be shocked to my core if someday all this information got leaked publicly and correlated to people's email addresses.

These are all situations where privacy matters regardless of the original intention. The "I only want to make my service better" defense applies to basically all data collection that most companies do. Even advertisers use that defense. It's reasonable for people to want to avoid being a part of that.

Of course, it's also reasonable for people not to care, to say that hacking is a risk they're willing to live with, and that they don't mind targeted ads, and that the books they read aren't sensitive. But it's not LARPing if someone has a different opinion on whether or not they want to tolerate that stuff.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

[1]: See, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/12/12/creepy-net.... Is it LARPing for me to be weirded out by a marketing department trolling over my reading/listening/watching habits looking for viral tweet material?

[choward]

> Whether you like it or not this collection does lead to better products

Maybe it's just me but every tech product I use these days gets worse over time. If something does get better, two things get worse. They mostly try to optimize for user engagement and not user experience.

> Understanding your users is vitally important.

And the only way to understand people is spying on them?

[jjj123]

There’s an important distinction to make: this tracking doesn’t necessarily lead to better products, it leads to better business metrics.

Sometimes a better product comes out of better business metrics, but other times they’re directly opposed.

[Google234]

This is not true. What if for example you want to make a change to the dictionary feature because you imagine that it’s not useful and should be less prominently accessible. How would you measure if this is a good idea or not without tracking its use? This has nothing to do with business and everything to do with making the product better.

[jjj123]

Sure, there’s an example where best case the user experience is improved and business metrics aren’t affected. But I assure you if that app has a decent analytics setup they’ll also be tracking business metrics, and if for some reason business metrics went down with that change past some acceptable threshold, that change won’t be launched.

Now if you look at opposite case, where a feature is worse for user experience but helps business metrics, that feature will definitely be launched. A small, mostly harmless example: Ever tried to hide twitter’s recommended accounts? It gives you the option to “see less often”, but curiously there’s no option to stop seeing the window forever. Why? Because clearly it benefits twitter’s business on average to keep showing these recommendations.

I’ve built enough dark patterns at my last job to know it always comes down to business metrics.

[choward]

Exactly. At the end of the day it's about profit and not necessarily a better product. Sometimes more profit means making a better product for the end user.

[PeterStuer]

'Privacy LARPers are a tiny segment of the market, the average person doesn’t really care if their ‘usage of the highlighter function is tracked’'

Which is exactly why we have regulation that forbids these practices, to protect the gullible from themselves. Furthermore, do you think privacy should be the privilege of just those that are smart and keen enough to be aware and prepared to engage in a relentless and perpetual battle with the most dark of patterns with every click they make?

[jononor]

Do you have something to back up the claim that this kind of data collection leads to better products?

[ihm]

This comment is such cowed boot-licking of a giant corporation. Completely antithetical to the hacker ethos.

[jjcon]

One can partake in the hacker ethos while not being a conspiracy nut - albeit I admit those sometimes go together.

[lwouis]

Most of the world-famous libre software is built without their developers study of massively collected usage data ("telemetry").

I look at VLC as a great example to follow. Their stats show 3.4 billion downloads (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/stats/downloads.html), yet they do no telemetry at all. The product works great. It could be improved of course, but Outlook could also greatly be improved, and they have high-salary staff and a boatload of data they extract from users. Yet it's slow as hell and has lots of UX I disagree with.

I'm myself the author of a replacement of Windows "alt-tab" on macOS (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/) which doesn't do any telemetry. I can lead the roadmap, with the help of the community, without spying on how users set their preferences and use the app.

As a matter of fact, it can be argued that acting that way can be negative value as it's reinforcing popular usage; or from the power-users perspective, dumbing down the software. By definition, advanced features will have low usage. It doesn't mean it should be removed.

Lastly, think about non-software businesses. Many amazing products have simply no way to gather data when the products are in the users homes. They rely on gathering data by talking to customers at the points of purchase, customer care, are in various forums with enthusiast users. This model has shown great results, so it is in no way clearly to be avoided in favor of telemetry-everything.

[rumanator]

> Most of the world-famous libre software is built without their developers study of massively collected usage data ("telemetry").

The sort of telemetry mentioned in the article is used for UX purposes, and God knows FLOSS sucks at UX.

And by the way, Debian collects and reports telemetry since the early 2000s, and Firefox is quite open on how much telemetry it collects.

[2rsf]

TBH the argument that it reinforce popular usage is a valid one, at MS we were taught again and again on how to design good experiments using telemetry but at the end it's hard to support changes when your data shows that something is working properly, and UI changes tend to produce a dip in usage or satisfaction graphs until they catch-up.

[Google234]

VLC’s UI is horrible.

[jacquesm]

It doesn't really matter does it? You don't collect data without consent, period.

Why is that so hard to understand?

Why don't developers ever push back against this sort of thing? Collectively we build this stuff, we are not 'soldiers following orders' which makes us responsible for what we create.

The current actual use is not relevant. Consent and the possible uses are relevant.

[thdrdt]

I think your comment is unfair.

Every webserver logs the IP address and the URL visited. Do you think most people know this? Do deverlopers push against this?

[kofejnik]

strawman; you visit someone else’s server, and therefore they get data about your visit; with kindle, you’re using your own device and there’s no expectation that amazon will be snooping

[thdrdt]

"you visit someone else’s server, and therefore they get data about your visit"

I don't think the average person knows this. A lot of people even have no clue about internet. So there is no consent most of the time. And we, the developers, just let the logs running.

"with kindle, you’re using your own device and there’s no expectation that amazon will be snooping"

Well I would absolutely have this expectation. I expect a device that is connected to the internet snooping on me. Then there is the Amazon brand. I absolutely don't trust them so I expect them to snoop in me.

But to be clear: I absolutely hate that my privacy is gone. I use all kinds of blockers to disable tracking and I also agree with jacquesm snooping is wrong. But I still think his point is too black and white and therefore unfair.

[ancarda]

>Every webserver logs the IP address and the URL visited.

I maintain a webserver - https://git.sr.ht/~ancarda/tls-redirector - that has no support for logging. If you wanted logs for some reason, you'd need to modify the source code to add that functionality.

Granted, tls-redirector isn't a general purpose webserver, but even in production I tend to turn off logging. I just don't see the need to have logs lying around that I never use.

[jacquesm]

No, not every webserver does. This is something that you could easily configure.

Yes, most people know this by now.

Yes, some developers push against this.

Also: It's the law. Collecting data without consent is not always legal. Whether that particular bit of data rises to the level of requiring consent is left as an exercise for the reader for their particular jurisdiction and industry.

[gizmo]

GDPR actually forces all websites to carefully keep track of what gets logged and for how long these logfiles are retained. So yes, legislators are pushing back against the common practice of logging everything just cause.

[hans_castorp]

> You don't collect data without consent, period.

This.

[AdmiralAsshat]

I think the privacy-concerned end-user thinks, "Yes, I completely understand why this information is being tracked and how it would be useful to Amazon. But I still don't like it."

[neiman]

As a freedom-concerned citizen, I always completely understood the policies and methodology of dictators and tyrants, and how what they do is useful for them.

[jjcon]

Quit LARPing - Amazon isn’t trying to take over the world by tracking how often you use the bookmark feature.

[Legogris]

Or "It's all fine and dandy today, but what about in x years when there's a new person/group with different incentives in charge?"

[ethbro]

I'm surprised no one brought up revenue sharing.

I was under the impression there was a revenue-allocation problem that Amazon needed to solve (Kindle Unlimited subscriptions?), that depended on reliable reading statistics. E.g. How many people read book A?

Wish I could find the article, but the implication was there were a ton of publishers attempting to game the system. For example, by publishing blank, very long "books" and having them "read" by software automation.

[neiman]

How does it make a difference?

First, if an entity want my input and are going to use it, they should be decent enough to pay me for giving it. Why do users need to work for free for Amazon?

Second, is it opt-in? If not, then there's an ethical issue here, even if a manual opt-out option is given (does it?). If there's no opt-out, there's a double ethical issue.

Thirdly, is this data deleted once it's being used for the goals you mentioned, or is it kept, making it a risk both for leaking and for Amazing deciding to put it for a different usage in the future.

[dimitrios1]

You don't. You have 100% freedom to not work for Amazon. Don't buy a kindle. Don't use a kindle.

[neiman]

If I would have known that by buying Kindle I end up working for Amazon, I indeed wouldn't have bought one.

It's deception. Please put on the box a big warning, "THIS DEVICE COLLECTS YOUR DATA", similar to those on cigarette boxes.

[shmel]

Are you genuinely surprised at this point? Pretty much all big tech companies were caught outright lying about user data collection. Why would you assume by default they don't try to get as much as possible? They are all based on ML, of course they do.

A year or two ago Amazon was swearing that humans don't listen to Alexa conversations until we learned they actually do. IIRC Amazon tried to backpedal: "of course they do, it is their job, we meant humans don't listen _for fun_".

At this point just assume the internet connectivity as such a warning.

[charles_f]

> Pretty much all big tech companies were caught outright lying about user data collection.

You can strip the big here.

[neiman]

Of course I'm not surprised, but I refuse to accept this as normal.

[TedDoesntTalk]

But your refusal doesn’t change the reality.

Kinda like refusing to believe that climate change is real does not change the reality.

[radicaldreamer]

There’s a plastic bag over the product saying don’t open it if you don’t agree with the terms of service and that it’s required to use the device.

Also, plenty of people just leave the kindle in airplane mode and use third party software like Calibre to manage their libraries.

[falcolas]

FWIW, the website providing this breakdown also collects analytics data without a warning. So, there's that to consider as well.

[jjcon]

It’s called the terms of service?

[jabirali]

Terms of service are written to be understandable by lawyers, not average end-users. At this point, understanding every terms of service, privacy policy, etc. presented by every piece of software, website, etc. encountered by an average user would require them to spend hours per week on it. This is assuming that they even have the language skills necessary to decipher the document (think of non-native English speakers, people without higher education, and so on.)

Creative Commons was on the right track with their human-readable licenses, see e.g. this example [1]. Apple is on the right track with their App Store "nutrition labels" [2]. This is what we need for people to make informed decisions. For physical objects like a Kindle, I believe such "nutrition labels" should ideally be put on the box (physical store) and website (online stores), so the consumer is aware before they go home and turn on the device (this makes it easier to compare the Kindle to a Boox or Nook at the store).

[1]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

[2]: https://mashable.com/article/apple-privacy-nutrition-labels-...

[ethbro]

ToS are effectively useless for this purpose.

If the industry moved to a standardized disclosure form (e.g. something like the HUD-1 [1] in real estate sales), people would stop complaining about this.

[1] https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/1.PDF

[oblio]

1. Nobody actually reads Terms of Service (well, governments and some major businesses do, but 99,99% of regular users don't).

2. Nobody reads them because most of the time they are explicitly user hostile, I'm pretty sure they are designed to prevent users from reading them.

[violetgarden]

Yes! Even when I try to read the terms of service, I find them hard to understand. I feel bad because it’s sort of shame on me for agreeing to stuff blindly. User hostile is a good way of putting it.

[danShumway]

Are they printed on the box in a readable form before the customer buys the product?

[neiman]

Very different things.

[2rsf]

Payment is a fair point on Kindles, I get why web sites offers free services in return to commercials (and your data) but I paid for my Kindle and (most of) the content I read.

[belorn]

I don't think that will ease anyone with privacy concerns. People who are against government surveillance is not against the police catching criminals and solving cold murder cases. The Golden State Killer case was a very good use of DNA profiling and DNA databases being used to catch a criminal. The problem is that many don't trust the government to only use it for those cases, and many others don't trust the technology to have a low enough false positive rate to not cause harm to innocent people.

Understanding how the book reader features are used in practice is good. Selling the same data to a advertiser is bad. Profiling people into predefined groups is bad, and the technology has risk of having false positives/negatives that reinforce stereotypes. The law has yet to catch up to treat information gathered by libraries and information gathered by a developer of e-readers as being very similar in risks.

[mumblemumble]

We can step outside of government examples, too, and find cases where corporations getting all data sciencey with this information have accomplished some pretty ucky - and also impossible to anticipate - things.

An instructive case here is Target figuring out that they could use customer purchase history to detect, with a pretty decent degree of confidence, when a customer was pregnant. They then proceeded to use this model to send out mailings, and those mailings resulted in people being outed in rather compromising and potentially seriously harmful ways.

[Cyphase]

Here's the Target story from 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

[tgv]

IP address, country, goodread account details, each page turn, exact page location, etc., seem unnecessary for that.

[iso1631]

Page location and page turn in there for syncing across devices, that's fine - ask the user 'sync across devices', if they say yes, not a problem. if they say no, don't send the data. Data that is stored would be something like 'currentlocation[$bookid] = $location'. Storing historical information (user was at location 1219 at 2020-01-06-05:12:41) is not required for that function.

Philosophy should always be store the minimum amount of data to provide the function that the user wants.

IP address is transitory and shouldn't be kept longer than needed for the tcp session, maybe it sticks in firewall logs, but that shouldn't be used for anything other than security.

goodread account details would only apply if you connect to goodread, I'm not sure what the benefit of that is, but I could see that 'user abc123 read this book' is useful data - again ask if you can send the data.

[Kaze404]

Fair enough. How do I turn it off?

[_jal]

The primary way that helps is to communicate that everyone on the team appeared to think this is perfectly acceptable to do without communicating it to the paying customer.

I mean, we already knew this, but it means any and all Amazon hardware must be considered potentially hostile.

[iso1631]

Almost all hardware and all software (especially software as a service) should be considered potentially hostile.

[pilsetnieks]

It's not about how it is used, it's about how it can be used (especially when a less benevolent entity gains access to it.)

[sumtechguy]

They have collected large amounts of data from pretty much day one on those devices.

Back when they had a cell phone in them. I was standing behind a guy who was supporting it. "Uh lets bring up where you are at? It says you are 10 miles off the coast of miami?...." "oh yeah I am calling from my yacht" "do you see any cell towers?" "no" "It kinda needs those to work. I am surprised I got the location data."

[api]

Privacy concerns are usually about how information could be misused, not how it's used right now or routinely.

[zxcb1]

A Kindle comes with Kindlings, a lesser form of the book, where you are being read by Amazon while reading; you are working for Amazon in ways you might never understand.

The Kindling never leaves Amazon properties; it is not yours even though you paid almost the full price of a book.

If there is rule of law in the US and EU, these will eventually become free e-books, that is, separated from Amazon; they will regain the status and properties of the book.

[taneq]

This is why you keep your e-books stashed on media you control, and put copies onto your Kindle when you you want to read them.

Same with any data you store on an iOS device. You never let a device you don't control have the only copy of any data important to you.

[zxcb1]

For example, readers might want to integrate their libraries into the knowledge base of their personal AI.

[raxxorrax]

I don't care how they are used honestly, I care about options to disable it.

[moksha256]

Yeah I came here to say the same. I'm about as tin-foil-paranoid-privacy-all-the-things as they come, but the "invasive" data mentioned in the post don't seem particularly invasive to me, and collecting that data seems perfectly appropriate for the purposes you mentioned.

With all that said, I do dream of a PINE64 E Ink device (or something that's open and hackable).

[enchiridion]

Remarkable is open and hackable.

https://github.com/reHackable

[jjcon]

It also costs more than an iPad and has terrible response times

[enchiridion]

Yep, pretty consistent for e-ink.

Still, I think it has the best value proposition for an e-ink tablet at the moment, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

[jjcon]

Probably true - I’ll snatch it up the moment color e-ink is a thing, color is vital for most of the papers I work with and for books I prefer a smaller form factor so from my perspective it sits in kinda an odd part of the market.

[enchiridion]

Color e-ink is close, which is really impressive imo. I did not expect to see it for years.

Who knows how long it will take to get good enough yields for affordable consumer products.

https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html

[gnusty_gnurc]

Yea analytics like this are really what I find to be so important, as a developer.

How much time and frustration do I potentially waste on something that no one ends up using?

Things like this are very useful and it's strange to me that people aren't sympathetic to that perspective.

[taneq]

I think a lot of people are sympathetic to that perspective while still wanting control over their privacy.

It's the difference between someone inviting you to come into their home for a visit, and you breaking in whenever you feel like to take notes on what they're doing.

[pseudalopex]

It's strange to you people care more about their autonomy than your convenience?

Telemetry can tell you what users are doing. It doesn't tell you why.

[gnusty_gnurc]

I'm saying as someone who works in software I empathize with the idea of spending lots of time implementing a feature, tearing hair out over some technical issue, etc. only to realize no one uses that feature.

I'd rather people be able to opt-in, but conceptually I'm not really upset that people can see my usage patterns, etc.

[pseudalopex]

I think most of us work in software. Asking for consent isn't hard.

Telemetry won't tell you nobody wants a feature you haven't implemented yet. User research might.

[Shared404]

> the "invasive" data mentioned in the post doesn't seem particularly invasive to me[.]

Attempting to get the subnet IP address? That seems pretty invasive.

From the article:

> Attempt to get the IP address on the local network (a 10. address, which was incorrect for me)

[eclipxe]

What, exactly, will that do for them?

[Shared404]

That's my point. The data is both A) Invasive and B) Pointless, unless trying to do things they shouldn't on your network. But they still collect it for some reason.

[neiman]

> don't seem particularly invasive to me, and collecting that data seems perfectly appropriate for the purposes you mentioned.

Fine. So you allow them to collect it. However, don't decide for others if it's "invasive" or "perfectly appropriate" for them or not. Do it opt-in such that people who wants to share their data could do that.

Oh yeah, and offer them payment for that. They deserve it.

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

There are some features in software I rarely use. But those times I do use them they are utterly essential. If I find such feature has been removed I am incensed.

Usefulness is NOT the same as usage.

[jjcon]

> Usefulness is NOT the same as usage.

Metrics can tell that story though so you’re arguing a straw man.

Example: If you see that 99% of users have never used a function ever - you have a pretty good idea that it needs to be reworked or removed. You may also see a function that is used by 80% of users once a month, that you may opt to keep.

[vharuck]

It's not so much that ubiquitous telemetry can't identify this, it's whether it's better for this than a focus group. You can have background telemetry with the focus group so you're not just giving customers what they say they want instead of what they need.

[jonathanstrange]

I'm not sure. While I understand that developer time needs to be cut down or restrained sometimes - though perhaps not at Amazon in this case, which concerns their core business -, your example could merely turn out to be a way of losing 1% of the users. Usage statistics alone cannot tell you whether your users hate or like a feature. Some features are always going to be used more than others.

[Google234]

What if that feature costs 30% of dev time? Without being able to measure you wouldn’t be able to make a good judgement. Imagine how science would work without experiments?

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

Wouldn't focus groups work better AND respect your users?

Devs think it is either telemetry or develop blind but in reality software was developed (and possibly was better) before telemetry using focus groups.

[djsumdog]

Don't care. Still hate it. Why not add in an opt-out of metrics in the preferences?

[whoopdedo]

As a developer, that is how _your dev team_ used the data. Can you confidently say that the metrics weren't also being accessed by the marketing department for different purposes? Or that it wasn't being shared with Amazon's business partners?