Post #1175605

2026-04-08 03:53 UTC

PERHAPS SLIGHTLY TOO PRIVACY-CONSCIOUS POWER USERS: *gleefully disable all telemetry, even the fully anonymized stuff* THE DEVS OF THAT APP, WHICH THE USERS RELY ON EVERY DAY: huh, guess only normies use our software? And they only use it in super boring ways? Alright cool. *implements something nominally useful for boring normies, but which power users hate* THOSE POWER USERS: omg why are you doing things we don’t like instead of working on the features we use?! How could we have possibly foreseen this would happen?!

Replies (4)

@bitprophet@social.coop 2026-04-08 04:01

Also, please miss me with stupid strawmen takes, I’m talking about situations where the dev (whoever it is) is legitimately trying to gather usage statistics, anonymized as best they can, for the purpose of understanding their userbase. Not selling it for the monies or etc. Is that more rare than we’d like? Oh yeah. Lotta scum out there. But the users I’m talking about are the types who are, let’s say, nuance-challenged.

Open ##2003702
@corry@infosec.exchange 2026-04-08 03:59

@bitprophet same users: my recurring bugs never get fixed! Devs: wow, no bugs to fix, wild!

Open ##2003704
@glyph@mastodon.social 2026-04-08 04:00

@bitprophet people got SO mad at me for https://blog.glyph.im/2023/03/telemetry-is-not-your-enemy.html but I stand by it

Open ##2003705
@ancoghlan@mastodon.social 2026-04-08 06:47

@bitprophet It's the one downside I see when uMatrix reports its routine dozens of tracking cookies and widgets blocked: one more Firefox user, no longer appearing in the userbase telemetry (sure, there's still the user agent being sent to the actual site, but how often is that used over a 3rd party resource query?)

Open ##2003709