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Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

Once the feature and toggle exist, reversing the default is a much lower barrier than adding the feature. Keeping it expensive helps reassure users that they'd notice the change.

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Absolutely agreed. A program without telemetry being possible at all is not one that I need to worry about enabling it behind my back. Imagine if /bin/bash had optional telemetry. Suddenly I'd need a way to ensure that telemetry is never enabled. In order to make sure that no confidential data are leaked, I'd need to have that setting always be visible, perhaps by adding it to my $PS1. I'd need to make a mental habit of checking that setting before executing any command that contains confidential data. All that additional overhead as a result of telemetry being an option at all.

There are a couple different stages on the sliding scale of telemetry, which have huge effects in the amount of privacy being sacrificed on the part of the user. However, the biggest technical hurdle is in that very first step, from "No telemetry is possible" to "telemetry is possible". Every single step after that is small and incremental, easily enabled with minimal effort.

* No telemetry is possible.

* Telemetry is possible, but requires searching in a menu to enable.

* Telemetry is possible, and has a single opt-in popup, path of least resistance is to disable telemetry. (e.g. An unchecked box that enables telemetry, and a "Continue" button. The easiest path is to ignore the box and just click continue.)

* Telemetry is possible, and has a single yes/no popup, both accept/decline are equally easy to select.

* Telemetry is possible, and has a single opt-out popup, path of lease resistance is to enable telemetry. (e.g. Same as the opt-in popup, but with the box defaulting to being checked.) This is the level that starts to raise red flags for me, and to make me feel uncomfortable with it.

* Telemetry is possible, and has several nag screens. These may re-occur each time you start the software, or re-occur sporadically. These may have the euphemistic option "Not Now", a newspeak phrase that prevents me from saying "No" entirely.

* Telemetry is mandatory, but can be blocked at the router level. Any software here and above is spyware, and should be treated as such.

* Telemetry is mandatory, and software refuses to run without a server connection.

> Imagine if /bin/bash had optional telemetry.

That immediately brought PowerShell to mind -- it boggles the mind how much opt-out telemetry Microsoft has in their core offerings.

Holy wat? I had to look it up to make sure you weren't joking, but yes, PowerShell has telemetry [0]. I hadn't ever looked into it when developing on Windows because it hadn't even crossed my mind that that would be something that was done. I think I'd insert "Silently enables telemetry without telling you and with no indication that telemetry can be disabled" just below the mandatory telemetry stage, and would extend the "spyware" description to include it.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

Not just PowerShell by the way. Most of their CLI offerings (compilers, shells, ...) that I've used have opt-out telemetry.

> Silently enables telemetry

Iirc most of them tell you about that the first time you use them, or they did back when I still used Windows.

The default was opt-in (telemetry off).

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