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by titusjohnson 661 days ago
There's no difference between tracking and metrics, they're the same thing. You get your metrics out of the data you track. Browser phone home? Tracking.

And there's no way for a user to validate that any tracking is indeed anonymous. The technical level needed to asses this is just... out of reach for everyone (the quantity of people who can properly verify this is small enough we can safely ignore it when speaking generally and use the coloquialism Everyone)
1 comments
eddyg 660 days ago
There is definitely a difference between tracking and metrics. One saves and associates information like “when and where did this piece of data come from?” along with other “identifiable” information, the other simply increments a count for things like “advanced feature X enabled”. If you don’t see the obvious difference between this type of data, then that’s on you. The latter can provide extremely valuable signals, and when “power users” disable it (and tell regular users to do the same, spreading FUD) because they think it’s “tracking” (it’s not), that’s their problem when a tool/app/service starts moving in directions they don’t like.
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titusjohnson 660 days ago
I was too succinct in my previous message, I guess.

To you and I there is a difference between tracking and metrics. To everyone else there is none. All my Mom knows is that the software dialed home. It is impossible to verify what it said to the mothership. The popup promised "Metrics only!" but then Little Snitch lit up like a Christmas tree 4 times! It's stealing my info!

How does the consumer know that the "metrics" didn't include home IP, OS version, and god knows whatever else? Again, metrics are a subset of data. Even the internet request to ship a fully anonymized usage info like "saved_files: 10, opened_files: 11" metric set contains Gobs and Gobs of identifiable information on and around the request itself. Does the company stash inbound request data for troubleshooting? That's fucking tracking bro. Your data dog instance is chock-full of tracking info.

It is not reasonable to expect end-users to be able to verify the claim that "only metrics are tracked". It is safer for everyone to assume this is a bald-faced lie, because at the end of the day it is impossible to verify to any level of certainty.

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