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I get why they want telemetry a lot of the time. Of course it's helpful. But often times you can trust them with that sort of information. I don't have any problem sending a 1-time log to a trustworthy organization but how many of those are there? And that's a big ask for a normie.
Also Windows sends a ton of telemetry and its still shit.
Yeah. Ever tried to search a windows problem code. Best case its a red herring.
Telemetry exists to aid enshittification. Widely hated update that has loads of people complaining online but causes no change in usage? Keep it. Update causes dip in usage? Post generic "we hear your concerns" statement, backpedal slightly and try again in 6 months. Beloved feature is only actually utilised by 5% of your users? Get rid of it.
Beloved feature is only actually utilised by 5% of your users?
I mean, there is a pretty strong argument that if 95% of users don't use a function, then it is not actually beloved and just more of a niche thing that the vast majority don't care about.
I think it is mainly happening because companies don’t want to pay for user research/studies and would rather try and make assumptions about how their software is used based on aggregate data collection.
Honestly the approach of telemetry for support makes sense. It's why for my Fedora system I have telemetry enabled to a decently high level that I would be alarmed at with windows.
Part of the reason is that it's so easy to enable/disable that I'm comfortable with more since I know how much I am sharing versus needing to "guess" how much is still open. Another is just that I have respect for software that respects me, so I'm more likely to send something back to help the dev.
The biggest tell for me in different areas is if data collection is presented as an opt in - even if it's a screen you have to see and answer before use - then to me it's a choice that I might want to make. If it's there by default, it's Spyware until proven otherwise, because I wasn't told and the process foe removing requires prior knowledge.
Most software companies I dealt with didn't provide enough support for the helpfulness of customers/users to make a significant difference to the support they provided, and that includes Microsoft in the context of an 'enterprise' support agreement. The few companies that did provide significant support never once, across decades of experience, identified that they had used or were helped by telemetry collection.
The telemetry collection may help them with product development, impact assessment and license enforcement. I never worked at one of those large vendors that does significant telemetry collection. Only the impact assessment might be considered relevant to support, though typically on a time frame irrelevant to any single support call.
Its a bit of both.
Absolutely, for sure, a decent amount of telemetry is for simply making decisions about what people actually use.
"Should we improve (thing), or drop it and stop supporting it?"
Well, lets just track how many people actually use it first for a bit and then decide.
Youd be surprised how often users beg for features and then stop using them after 1 week lol.
But sometimes a random feature you thought no one uses much turns out to be actually quite popular.
This same goes for optimizing. Your highest traffic parts of your website are there you wanna focus the most on stuff being optimized to save money and improve user experience.
Do a tonne of companies track stuff just to sell it as data for training AI?
Yeah, they do. And its gross.
But there is a huge amount of telemetry thats just developers wanting to genuinely improve the user experience, catch bugs, etc.
No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing, they want to know what updates broke.
No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing
Maybe, but 834 of their business partners are very interested in what I'm doing, and how much they should bid for Copilot ad slots on my computer.
Funny that they log ssh logins to any server you connect to, and send it back to the mother ship. They litterly have no need for username and IP of server.
That's why the increase in gathered telemetry correlates with a decrease in updates that break things.
And also an increase in updates that add things that people want and use! Like the new Copilot™ For Office 365™ Environments With Microsoft Teams™ Integration (new) & knuckles
Then why are they making so mich revenue through search ads? Brother stop being so naive.
They do give a shit about what the collective is doing, which is ironic, because the people that want things to change are the people that stop Microsoft from seeing what they are doing. When the power user opts out of letting Microsoft see how they use Windows, it pushes Windows user base more towards the center, as Microsoft sees it. So, when a feature is lost, a user can't claim that the feature was load bearing because their use-case is self-muted. Of course, you can always just switch to Linux and hope whatever feature you want has enough support from the community to maintain status in the kernel, but that's just trading one engineer for the other.
