[lamasery]

Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying.

Aggregating request statistics server-side unless you're only generating those requests to spy on what I'm doing on my computer is more like the not-spying you're talking about.

[mgfist]

Most telemetry is more along the lines of "user spent N minutes on platform, clicked on these things, looked at these other things" etc etc. And the primary way devs use this data is by aggregating across all users and running a/b tests or viewing longer term trends.

Are some companies spying on you the way you say? Yea, probably. Most of us just want data to know what's working and what's not.

[vlovich123]

The logical conclusion is you’re asking for no local products and everything to run server side. It’s kind of a ridiculous position that doesn’t change the spying being done other than it’s on the other side of a browser.

[lamasery]

I accounted for this in my post. Obviously if you’re making requests just so you can spy, that’s spying.

[vlovich123]

No you didn’t. If I build you a web video editor, is that because I want to spy on you or because I want to make deployment easier and reduce install friction?

You’re making a distinction that puts you in the privileged judge position of evaluating if a service is making requests just so you can spy vs what the app author’s might believe is a critical design feature in how they want the product to operate.

[embedding-shape]

> Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying.

I agree, but once you cross the borders out to the internet, I'd say you need to stop seeing that as "Me sitting at my computer at home", because you're actually "on someone else's property" at that point essentially. And I say this as someone who care greatly about preserving personal privacy.

[lamasery]

I deeply hate that this attitude took over even among “hackers”.

Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware.

Tracking what I do on my own computer doesn’t stop being spying because the program I’m doing stuff in can make network requests. WTF.

[embedding-shape]

> Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware.

Well, I was mainly talking about network requests, which are quite literally served by "my hardware" when your client reaches out to my servers, and they agree to serve your client. I do agree that it sucks that browser viewports now also are considered "mine" from the perspective of servers, but you do have a choice to execute that code or not, you can always say no.

I don't think it's as much "this attitude took over", people saying that the internet is the wild west and warning you "browse at your own peril" has been around for as long as I can remember.

[lamasery]

Yeah server logs don’t bother me. I’m requesting a resource, you unavoidably see that happen.

The attitude that’s changed is that in the 90s and 00s a program that sent information about what you’re doing that wasn’t necessary and expected for how it operates would have been instantly, popularly, and unequivocally labeled spyware by a programmer crowd. Now it’s normal and you get a bunch of folks claiming it’s ok.

[account42]

Worse, you get a bunch of programmers claiming it's impossible to write software without that level of spying.