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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

> this is ultimately placing the convenience of the developers ahead of the privacy and autonomy of the users

this is a biased framing of the problem. first of all, the telemetry is often more useful for PMs (not developers) to make decisions on what efforts to prioritize vs not, and to assess relative success of launches. less of a convenience thing, but an industry standard way to get some meager signal from all your users, not just the ones that fill out surveys (and i'm sure theres plenty of complaints about surveys being unrepresentative too).

second of all, the work that developers and PMs do with this anonymized data is usually intended to help users.

pitting developer vs user is a false binary.

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> pitting developer vs user is a false binary.

Not in the modern software ecosystem it's not. How often is telemetry used to make a product better vs. helping to add more dark patterns to increase "engagement"? No amount of telemetry seems to stop Microsoft from shoving more user hostile garbage into Windows 11.

>first of all, the telemetry is often more useful for PMs to make decisions on what efforts to prioritize vs not, and to assess relative success of launches. second of all, the work that developers and PMs do with this anonymized data is usually intended to help users.

OK, then it places the developers and PMs convenience ahead of the users privacy and autonomy.

In 18 years, I've yet to see someone use telemetry in the interest of the user. I've seen it be used to save money, earn more money, and quite a bit for mental masturbation. What I've seen actually work in the interest of users is qualitative user research, e.g. user testing, and actively engaging with users.

Sure, one can make the argument that if booking.com upsells rental cars more effectively they earn more money and provide a better service and experience for users. Haven't seen this happen once though.

Former Firefox dev here. I was part of the Firefox performance team, which introduced Telemetry in Firefox. We used Telemetry to measure the performance of many operations, to determine, among other things:

- which operations were running slowly on real user's computers (and how commonly they ran slowly), so that we could fix these;

- whether users were faced with out of memory errors, or timeouts, etc.;

- whether users had abnormally large database, preferences, etc. files, which suggested that we should optimize for such cases;

- in some cases, whether some features were used at all because if they weren't, it wasn't worth optimizing them.

I'd qualify these as definitely in the interest of the user.

I know that not everybody enjoys having Telemetry collected on their usage, but without this, Firefox would never have been able to catch up with Chrome on user-visible performance.

Not a browser dev, but not long ago I spotted a discussion of Chrome potentially deprecating/removing a rarely used XML API. The discussion was halted when a sudden spike in usage (IIRC, from well below 0.1% of whatever the metric to just slightly over 0.1%) was noticed. I have strong reason to believe I contributed to the spike (I was prototyping a change that hit it rapidly in the same time period), and I have strong reason to believe this particular API was preserved because telemetry was in place where a more conventional outcry would’ve been needed to otherwise stop the change (ahem alert ahem). But there wouldn’t be an outcry, the API is long standardized but basically unused outside of very odd corners of the web that aren’t very web centric.

I don’t want browsers or tools to undermine the trust of their users by quietly tracking unknown things. But I agree collecting usage data matters in ways that aren’t always appreciated.

I don’t know how to do it transparently and preserve/establish trust. But I think the instinct to distrust any metric collection probably isn’t the right balance to strike.

FWIW, the one feature that I had removed because nobody used it was the yellow bar in the bottom "Add-on foo is slowing down your Firefox, do you want to disable it?", so nothing quite standard :)

But knowing which addons are slowing Firefox is quite useful, even if I decide to not disable the addon!

Yes, but I reimplemented the feature and moved it to about:performance.

Dammit I was using that! ;)

> - in some cases, whether some features were used at all because if they weren't, it wasn't worth optimizing them.

Terrible conclusion, by that reasoning a drunkard should only seek for his keys under the streetlight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

That’s good internetdebatesmanship, but if the post was “Firefox spent years optimizing thing no one ever uses at all”, it’s easy to imagine the ire that would raise for people who just wanted their keys not to be inexplicably lost under a streetlight.

Well, at some point, you have to make choices. If you don't have enough developers, you can either optimize features that users are using or features that users aren't using because they _might_ use them some day.

If you do the former, there is a chance you may be missing out. You do the latter, you are certain that you are missing out.

It's super useful in big companies. If you want head count, you gotta show numbers. Otherwise projects get canned. This is especially true for projects like the ones shown. Organizations want to know if people are actually using this stuff.

I disagree with the practice, but it's definitely the way it is.

You're missing the point by focusing on "developer". "Developer team and related teams" might be a better phrase because it includes the PMs.

This. When I use the term "developer" in these sorts of contexts, I'm referring to the company as a whole, not just programmers working on the product.

Exactly, both are developing a product.

If usage information is so valuable, why not ask for it instead of simply taking it?

The answer I've gotten to this question from multiple sources is: because if we ask, not enough users say yes.

Which speaks volumes.

I've learned that a lot of people somehow made it to adulthood without a single lesson on what actual enthusiastic true consent is.

The followup to that is: '...and they'll switch to alternatives that don't ask.'

because 80% of users dont opt in, dont opt out, they roll with the defaults, and when asked dont mind that youre getting anonymized telemetry back. most users are not privacy maxis like those motivated to comment 3 threads down on hn posts like these. they want to get their stuff done and expect the product to improve and understand that we have evolved these practices as pragmatic tradeoffs.

They trust us and we are eroding that trust by invading their privacy for bs reasons.

They do not understand, they just shrug “I guess devs need this”. They expect us to know, to care, because it is our job. We don’t and it’s sad.

And because of this erosion, more people are pushing back on telemetry. Imagine if everyone decided to get together, detail what telemetry they needed and why and outline how users can help - protect their privacy and actually Do The Right Thing(tm) that more people would be willing to care, and maybe contribute.

Not to mention it's usually possible to opt out (as it is with Next.js/Vercel).

The type of people who volunteer are different from the general population.

That’s why things like public opinion surveys have to be random and why jury duty selection isn’t volunteer.

“help us help you”?

If that is so, just ask and explain and be more specific than “this helps improve things”. How hard is it to say how exactly this vague ball of data is helping The Users?

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