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by tmpfile 1714 days ago
> make it clear and easy to disable for those who care

Exactly. Telemetry can be a useful like you said and should be clear to users when they are being opted into it. Especially if someone has disabled all telemetry, they should be prompted to enable it or configure it with the new settings. If you silently re-enable it on their device when they already went thru the trouble of disabling it (and not expecting the settings to change day-to-day), you'll get some knee-jerk assumptions and reactions, whether your intentions where noble or not.
2 comments
capdeck 1714 days ago
> make it clear and easy to disable for those who care

No. Make it clear and easy to ENable for those who care.

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NullPrefix 1714 days ago
Telemetry of settings usage would tell that there are no users who care to enable it.
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brundolf 1714 days ago
Sure, they should have had a pop-up telling people about the change and making clear the option to opt-out. That would have been better. But seeing some of the responses here you'd think Microsoft had started streaming a video feed of your entire desktop with no way to disable it.
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Silhouette 1714 days ago
But seeing some of the responses here you'd think Microsoft had started streaming a video feed of your entire desktop with no way to disable it.

I once asked, seriously, whether there was any guarantee that enabling telemetry in a Microsoft developer product would not result in sending code we were working on back to Microsoft, inadvertently or otherwise. No-one could give me a clear confirmation that it would not. The responses were about 20% "we trust Microsoft, they'd obviously never do this" and about 80% silent downvotes.

If my business could be facing considerable damages for violating confidentiality agreements if something like that ever happened and sensitive information did leak, that's just not a convincing response. Microsoft have been pushing mandatory telemetry, mandatory and automatically deployed user-hostile updates and radical changes in data usage like GitHub Copilot. You'd have to be crazy to give them any benefit of the doubt in this area now. If they want phone-home on and they promise they're not going to take anything they shouldn't, we want to see the technical measures and legally actionable documentation to back that up.

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tmpfile 1714 days ago
Definitely. Settings that have the perception of "streaming a video feed of your entire desktop" should be treated with more care.
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