But yeah, terminals are very sensitive environments, opt-in should be a default even at launch.
Then why is the telemetry-encrusted modern Windows a usability fail, even compared to past versions of Windows which relied on extensive in-house user testing?
That's my theory anyway.
As evidence of this, I offer: the vast majority of all human behavior over literally all time.
Is this really the case? It seems that to find mistakes in software for various interaction patterns, truly exhaustive automated tests would likely work far better by various measures (coverage, reliability, reproducibility, reusability etc.) and at the same time do not have the extreme downside of privacy invasion. For example, see a section from the Age of Empires Post Mortem https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/the-game-developer-archives... :
"8. We didn’t take enough advantage of automated testing. In the final weeks of development, we set up the game to automatically play up to eight computers against each other. Additionally, a second computer containing the development platform and debugger could monitor each computer that took part. These games, while randomly generated, were logged so that if anything happened, we could reproduce the exact game over and over until we isolated the problem. The games themselves were allowed to run at an accelerated speed and were left running overnight. This was a great success and helped us in isolating very hard to reproduce problems. Our failure was in not doing this earlier in development; it could have saved us a great deal of time and effort. All of our future production plans now include automated testing from Day One."
You are not entitled to access my machine, and that shouldn't be casually dismissed with "don't worry, we're not doing anything bad." You're creating potential vulnerabilities, and by implementing identifiable patterns, reducing the security of your users.
You shouldn't spy on people, and when you do, it's wrong. Remotely inspecting people's behavior is spying.
Your software doesn't need to phone home. It doesn't need automatic updates. You don't need to spy on people to develop good software. That's toxic nonsense.
- be opt-in
- provide an easy to read & access log which can be reviewed by the user at any point
- never collect unnecessary information 'just because' it might be useful in the future
- should provide a very good detailed analysis of any claims to anonymity
If something doesn't even fulfil the first criterion, it's probably violating all the others too.
Case studies, focus groups, surveys and interviews are great ways to determine usage patterns and problems with products and services. Of course, you'd need to pay users to participate in them, and then you need to pay expensive employees to conduct, collect and analyze the results. Spying is cheaper than doing any of that.
I agree both that telemetry is useful and that there's not necessarily a place for it in the tool I use to manage my workstation and hundreds of servers. Perhaps I'd opt in to a middle ground, that is collect telemetry locally into a support file I can review, evaluate, and potentially redact before submission.
