Unpopular truth: Telemetry collection actually happens because people are garbage at being helpful to support
2026-07-06 04:27 UTC
Replies (9)
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@Fontasia@feddit.nl 2026-07-06 04:28
No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing, they want to know what updates broke.
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@kayazere@feddit.nl 2026-07-06 05:35
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.
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@Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-07-06 05:53
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.
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@pixxelkick@lemmy.world 2026-07-06 06:00
Its a bit of both. Absolutely, for sure, a decent amount if 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 solo 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.
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@artyom@piefed.social 2026-07-06 05:49
I get why they want telemetry a lot of the time. Of course it’s helpful. But often times you can’t 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.
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@Cyv_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-07-06 07:28
I dunno, it feels weird to have somebody act like the messages people send to support are supposed to result in good PR or some kind of benefit for them. It isn’t a PR outlet. It’s definitely not a community run beta testing/bug report line. It’s meant to be a point of contact for people who are likely already upset. The hope is that they come out the other end less upset, not happy they had a problem that support could fix. There is no winning, you aim to break even. Feels kinda like complaining that IT isn’t giving you tangible returns. They aren’t meant to. They exist to put out your fires and prevent more. Bottom line for me is, I don’t trust you. I don’t care what you claim telemetry is for, I assume that you are like any other business and want to make as much money as is possible, and that’s all the data will be used for. Selling it to whoever is interested. Dynamic pricing. Etc. Sorry, but that’s the world we live in.
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@fonix232@fedia.io 2026-07-06 08:14
I mean yeah, to some extent you're right. But it is also due to telemetrics being helpful in diagnosing issues before users even report them, measuring their business effects, or even doing A/B tests to see how a new feature may affect the user experience. Problem is that companies realised this info can also be used for other purposes - such as, datamining the users - to create another lucrative revenue source...
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@aggelalex@lemmy.world 2026-07-06 13:28
It also happens because error reporting in applications is garbage in general
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@fubarx@lemmy.world 2026-07-07 06:21
In a meeting, asked a big multinational appliance company what all the connected device data collection was for. Not a single person had an answer that benefited the customer.