Telemetry

Posted Jul 24, 2024 22:08 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Telemetry by Heretic_Blacksheep
Parent article: Lessons from the death and rebirth of Thunderbird

> Telemetry, by the nature of the beast, should be opt-out. That way those that don't mind need do nothing to contribute, while those that don't want to contribute or have a situation where they can't do so may turn it off. The projects will get enough data to draw meaningful conclusions. You don't get that when it's opt-in (tyranny of the default - most people never change them even in Linux land).

The problem, in Europe at least (driven by rampant collection of personal data in America) is that that sort of thing by law has to be "informed consent", ie it's opt-in and you need to be told what you're opting in to.

But yes I agree with you about the fact that statistics is complicated, hence the old saw "There are lies, damn lies and statistics". Or as I like to rephrase it - "Statistics tell you how to get from A to B. What they don't tell you is you're all at sea".

Witness my earlier comment about lorry journey times. "We're applying bell-curve maths to a skewed distribution. For what we're doing it doesn't matter but you are getting the odd weird results because it's the wrong maths". (The skew - in MOST cases, wasn't enough to make any real difference. In a couple, it made a BIG difference.)

If you don't know you're applying the wrong maths to the wrong data, the answer won't be right. It won't even be wrong...

Cheers,
Wol

Telemetry

Posted Jul 26, 2024 15:20 UTC (Fri) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

If you don't collect personally identifying information, there should be no problem, even in Europe, collecting things like the number of startups per day on Linux.