Gonna come out with a controvertial take here, but I am actually fine with anonymised usage stats/telemetry if they are solely designed to improve the product, and as long as there is an opt-out. Many people are get furious about telemetry in firefox or distros, but when i ask what their precise issue is with it, can give no answer.
Sending these stats is also a contribution to the projects that help improve software.
I think a lot of the arguing people are doing here is about the usefulness of opt-in vs opt-out. And personally I tend to agree with the side of the opt-out group; telemetry that users opt-in to is just less useful overall for figuring the average needs of your users. Opt-in is way too self-selecting and shows you very little about what actually needs to be worked on for everyone. However, if the telemetry is not privacy-respecting then opt-out is not a good thing at all. But I think I trust the endless OS system that fedora is trying to use.
I would say opt-out is fine as long as the option is presented to the user early on in the UX. Like for example during installation. If it’s opt-out but the option to do so is hidden then that’s not good.
Many people are get furious about telemetry in firefox or distros, but when i ask what their precise issue is with it, can give no answer.
They already gave you their answer. They don’t think collecting data without very deliberate opt in is acceptable. There is no need for anything more precise than that. It’s a perfectly complete answer on its own.
Personally, i see metric/telemetry collection like democracy; you are perfectly entitled to not participate, but if you opt out you also forfeit your right to complain about bugs or missing features.
I work on a companion app for a piece of very expensive hardware where our users are trained on how to report problems, and I’d still have 1 stack trace from our telemetry system than 1000 user reports. Our privacy policy explicitly states that we collect some information for the purpose of identifying and fixing issues, and for product development, and that we won’t sell or share that data. We operate in the EU, so the amount of money we could get from a data broker selling that information would be a rounding error on the fines we’d see if we did.
Absolutely read the privacy policy and call out weak policies, but “metrics” and “telemetry” are not synonyms for “spying”
I can do that:
Because constantly, throughout the entirety of the corporate controlled internet era we are now in, and I mean constantly as in it is hard to find an exception, anonymous data collection has at some point in the future turned into non-anonymous data collection to sell to data brokers.
Hell, there are a staggering.number of services being caught with ignoring opt-out preferences even and non-anonymously tracking users via identification numbers.
The problem I have with it is that eventually, every single closed source “anonymous” consumer telemetry will eventually become de-anonymized and almost always sold. If any capitalist company sees a cash cow that they aren’t milking, shareholders or rich owners will demand that it be milked.
I would struggle to find a case where it hasn’t happened with any popular software
