Re: Telemetry on by default kitty

[Leo Famulari]

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.