People keep acting like telemetry is my problem as the end-user. I don't care about your development practices. I don't care about your telemetry. All I care about is if the software works, and my privacy is protected. The problems with getting telemetry data are your problem. The burden should not be on us to have to turn off all this data-gathering to protect my data.
EDIT: The proverbial "you", not you in particular.
> I don't care about your telemetry. All I care about is if the software works
Newsflash: The latter requires the former, especially in large-userbase installations with tons of features.
I say this as a huge defender of privacy: Telemetry is not evil in and of itself and I wish people would give it a rest when it comes to yelling about opt-in telemetry, because it seriously harms the cause in cases where it matters, such as actual transmission of personal data.
Seriously, things like "Do you click the Edit menu a lot" is not useful data to anyone but the devs of the software, for development reasons.
> Newsflash: The latter requires the former, especially in large-userbase installations with tons of features.
The vast majority of computing history argues for exactly the opposite.
In fact, with it's new "all in on telemetry regardless of reputation damage" approach, MS's software often does not work. Clearly MS have taken a wrong approach, and seem completely unwilling to rethink it.
Sorry, but no. I've been using OSS for a few decades now, and often bugfixes are pretty quick. As long as you're ok reporting bugs, and doing some legwork. ;)
You are not everyone; you are in fact the extreme minority. You're exactly the kind of person who should not have a problem unticking an opt-out box.
As I said, please please focus on privacy issues that matter. Trying to be snide about inconsequential telemetry is a waste of time and of public awareness.
You want to complain about Windows 10's privacy practices instead, go ahead, because that is a good example of abusing telemetry and not respecting the user. But sometimes, "telemetry" is just "anonymous UUID + software version sent every 7 days" and people still complain about that. Then those same people will go and complain about the software vendor dropping support for an old version when "users are still using it". Again, newsflash, that's stuff you know because of that tiny bit of telemetry.
I'd highly encourage people complaining about telemetry to do actual devops for a few weeks or something and understand how blind you are without instrumentation.
One does not prevent the other. Companies do talk to their customers but data talks far better and reveals insights that customers themselves don't have.
There's wrong ways to use telemetry, but overall they are positive, especially in large apps where gaining insights on tiny percentages of your userbase is both important and impractical. That does mean Windows, Android, Chrome, Firefox, etc.
It's the same in game dev. You might see through telemetry that 80 percent of your churn is right after one specific quest. Without telemetry, this might not be something you notice, because churn rarely ever talks and when they do they're not accurate.
> ... data talks far better and reveals insights that customers themselves don't have.
I can see how that would be the case for games. They're special purpose one-offs, and aren't tools for getting a job done.
For business applications though, the concept of "data talking far better" than actually talking to customers seems very wrong headed to me.
It's very common for business application users to follow processes that are effectively workarounds for missing or broken functionality in their tool set.
When they're able to communicate with the vendor and describe what they're actually needing to do, the tools can be changed to achieve the desired result properly.
I've never heard of telemetry being able to address "how the tool should be working" rather than sending a stream of data showing what a user did. Maybe good for support issues, but pretty useless for product planning and addressing actual user needs.
EDIT: The proverbial "you", not you in particular.