On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 08:35:18PM +0200, Leo Prikler wrote: > Perhaps it's valuable for developers, but as a user I often have next > to no information about what data gets collected and for which purpose, > both of which are important for *informed consent*. If "the masses" > don't really care about the data being collected and would rather see > improvements on their software, they are free to enable telemetry – > that's what opt-in is for – but my personal opinion on this is that > you're going to have a hard time convincing people, that you actually > only collect reasonable amounts and use them with respect for privacy > rights.
Yeah, I agree that telemetry is a problem in addition to being valuable for developers. I think that making it opt-in doesn't really help very much. People use defaults. I read that Firefox struggles with software quality on GNU/Linux because almost nobody enables the telemetry. I feel that, ultimately, we already trust most software authors implicitly and totally, because we are not auditing their programs. So, I am personally happy to enable the telemetry for most software I use — especially if it is free software and especially for software that deals with the network. I don't personally see the point of treating telemetry as a special case in terms of trust or consent.
