Transparency is key here. If projects explained the steps taken to anonymize the data (either provably using Differential Privacy, or approximated via some other means), I feel like people might trust them more. Even with DP, though, the server does see IP addresses, even if it doesn't know what the telemetry is, and that alone might cross the line for some people. Even if the project promises to not log them.
As a dev, telemetry makes me nervous because so many projects rely on it too heavily and make bad design decisions because the telemetry blinds them.
- Have a screen that shows all telemetry that is going to be or has been sent
- Ask for permission to send any telemetry, or certain types of telemetry (i.e. crash reports)
– Publicly share the collected telemetry.
Can you give 1(one) example of a program which was improved by using telemetry ? And no, trashing the UI in the name of change or modernism does not count.
Thank you.
- We found out by looking at the distribution of software version that we had a strong holdout on one specific revision. It turns out we had a regression in a niche feature which was very important to a sub-community of our users, and users were basically telling each other to just use that old version. No bug report was filed until we found out via analytics and asked.
- We have a "game quirks" mechanism where the emulator reports weird edge cases that happen very rarely. Current list: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/master/Source/Co..., example usage: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/ffdc8538a162b1ca... . We used this to find games that use currently unimplemented or stubbed features.
- The list of popular games being played on the emulator was extremely surprising because it turns out there's a huge disconnect in what most NA/EU players are playing and what JP players are playing. This led to us adding a bunch of new games to the list we regularly test for performance and stability regressions. Would you have guessed that Inazuma Eleven GO: Strikers 2013 is in the top10 of emulated games on Dolphin?
I’m talking extremely basic things, like, what are the most popular crashes in the app? Which did I introduce in the most recent version? Why is there an increase in end to end latency in fetching data from the server? Stuff that would fall under “bug fixes and improvements” that you would likely not notice.
The last example sounds detailed enough. And some privacy considerations are moot when the app is a client for your server.
