[conradev]

I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better.

Transparency is key here. If projects explained the steps taken to anonymize the data (either provably using Differential Privacy, or approximated via some other means), I feel like people might trust them more. Even with DP, though, the server does see IP addresses, even if it doesn't know what the telemetry is, and that alone might cross the line for some people. Even if the project promises to not log them.

[JohnFen]

The problem with explanations and promises is that there's a lot of bad water that has flowed under those bridges. They amount to just saying "trust me".

As a dev, telemetry makes me nervous because so many projects rely on it too heavily and make bad design decisions because the telemetry blinds them.

[conradev]

Absolutely. There are steps that software can take to build this trust, though, like

- Have a screen that shows all telemetry that is going to be or has been sent

- Ask for permission to send any telemetry, or certain types of telemetry (i.e. crash reports)

– Publicly share the collected telemetry.

[hulitu]

> I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better.

Can you give 1(one) example of a program which was improved by using telemetry ? And no, trashing the UI in the name of change or modernism does not count.

Thank you.

[delroth]

We introduced some opt-in telemetry in dolphin-emu.org several years ago. I remember several times we discovered things we would likely have completely missed otherwise:

- We found out by looking at the distribution of software version that we had a strong holdout on one specific revision. It turns out we had a regression in a niche feature which was very important to a sub-community of our users, and users were basically telling each other to just use that old version. No bug report was filed until we found out via analytics and asked.

- We have a "game quirks" mechanism where the emulator reports weird edge cases that happen very rarely. Current list: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/master/Source/Co..., example usage: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/ffdc8538a162b1ca... . We used this to find games that use currently unimplemented or stubbed features.

- The list of popular games being played on the emulator was extremely surprising because it turns out there's a huge disconnect in what most NA/EU players are playing and what JP players are playing. This led to us adding a bunch of new games to the list we regularly test for performance and stability regressions. Would you have guessed that Inazuma Eleven GO: Strikers 2013 is in the top10 of emulated games on Dolphin?

[skeaker]

This is a fascinating answer that has persuaded me to your side. I recall opting out of Dolphin telemetry because I simply couldn't be bothered to check what would be sent, but seeing not only examples of what data is sent but also how it's used in such a positive way will definitely have me turning the telemetry on next time I go to use it.

[delroth]

We have a privacy policy which describes what we collect in a bit more details, see https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/privacy/

https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/master/Source/Co... is the actual code which collects most of the information. We do multiple things to avoid being able to track user activity too much -- for example, while every instance of Dolphin has a unique ID so we can do things like unique counts, events that happen within a play session are associated to truncated_hash(unique ID + game ID) and not directly with the unique ID. This means that we can only correlate events from the same user playing the same game, but not* two events from one user playing different games.

* Our implementation is a bit weak given that the set of all gameids is small and enumerable. We could probably do better there.

[conradev]

The word “telemetry” can mean a lot more than “detailed usage data to inform design decisions”

I’m talking extremely basic things, like, what are the most popular crashes in the app? Which did I introduce in the most recent version? Why is there an increase in end to end latency in fetching data from the server? Stuff that would fall under “bug fixes and improvements” that you would likely not notice.

[pseudalopex]

The word telemetry became common when it became more than optional crash reports and update checks.

The last example sounds detailed enough. And some privacy considerations are moot when the app is a client for your server.

[philliphaydon]

Windows.

[hulitu]

You mean that calc.exe opening in 3 seconds is better than instantly. Or dissapearing ribbon and title bar on windows in a multimonitor setup is better than before. Or the new designed shutdown menu.Or the white fonts on light background. Or dissapearing scrollbars because someone thought that this is a good idea. Or the new save dialog when you need 3 clicks just to be able to select the folder where you want to save.

[TeMPOraL]

Windows went downhill fast since introduction of telemetry.

[philliphaydon]

Windows 10 is better than any previous version of Windows. So how did it go downhill?

[TeMPOraL]

User experience. Windows 10 was an upgrade over 8, which was a huge downgrade over 7. Not only did telemetry not help Microsoft improve the UX of their OS after Windows 7, in Windows 10 it's been getting worse with each update, and Windows 11 is slated to be a disaster.

[philliphaydon]

Windows 10 was an upgrade over 7. Windows 10 UX improved over 7.

This sounds more like 'MS bad, must hate MS at all costs' then actual legitimate complaints.

[ginko]

Windows has been getting worse for the last 3 or so generations of Windows.

[philliphaydon]

Windows 10 is better than any previous version. I mean my Windows laptop is far more stable than any distro I run on my desktop and work laptop.

[falcolas]

How? I mean, in what way, and in response to which metrics?

[MikusR]

Office.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

I completely agree. However, Microsoft has demonstrated user-hostile tactics in the telemetry field so people don't feel inclined to trust them.