As someone who's worked on multiple power-user GUIs professionally, telemetry can be genuinely useful for improving the product. You can discover features that are never used and should be removed so attention can be focused elsewhere, and others that are used frequently and deserve more attention, and others that users may frequently have trouble with and should be fixed or improved.
I'm not saying this justifies dark patterns, and I have no firsthand knowledge of whether Microsoft is exclusively using this data for legitimate purposes. If it were me I'd enable it by default but make it clear and easy to disable for those who care. That said: I don't think the knee-jerk assumption that this is a wholly evil thing is justified.
It's not knee-jerk. This is the same company putting ads in the start menu and trying to force Windows users to log in to microsoft.com on boot. And I guarantee you, the PMs who pushed for those 'features' genuinely believed they were improving my user experience too.
It can be, but when you're a company like Microsoft you've poisoned the well with anyone who cares about these things. I have no confidence whatsoever that MS has purely good, product-improving/research-based intentions with VSCode telemetry.
As for this change, I've seen it myself, and I think it's just poor design, nothing evil. They are just refactoring telemetry control and fucked up with porting over existing preferences because it's not a 1:1 thing.
> make it clear and easy to disable for those who care
Exactly. Telemetry can be a useful like you said and should be clear to users when they are being opted into it. Especially if someone has disabled all telemetry, they should be prompted to enable it or configure it with the new settings. If you silently re-enable it on their device when they already went thru the trouble of disabling it (and not expecting the settings to change day-to-day), you'll get some knee-jerk assumptions and reactions, whether your intentions where noble or not.
Sure, they should have had a pop-up telling people about the change and making clear the option to opt-out. That would have been better. But seeing some of the responses here you'd think Microsoft had started streaming a video feed of your entire desktop with no way to disable it.
But seeing some of the responses here you'd think Microsoft had started streaming a video feed of your entire desktop with no way to disable it.
I once asked, seriously, whether there was any guarantee that enabling telemetry in a Microsoft developer product would not result in sending code we were working on back to Microsoft, inadvertently or otherwise. No-one could give me a clear confirmation that it would not. The responses were about 20% "we trust Microsoft, they'd obviously never do this" and about 80% silent downvotes.
If my business could be facing considerable damages for violating confidentiality agreements if something like that ever happened and sensitive information did leak, that's just not a convincing response. Microsoft have been pushing mandatory telemetry, mandatory and automatically deployed user-hostile updates and radical changes in data usage like GitHub Copilot. You'd have to be crazy to give them any benefit of the doubt in this area now. If they want phone-home on and they promise they're not going to take anything they shouldn't, we want to see the technical measures and legally actionable documentation to back that up.
But when it is used they'll have telemetry on errors that occur during the restore process. So hopefully the next person doesn't have to deal with the same issues that the first did.
I believe the GP's point was that if you follow the "remove anything that users rarely use in telemetry data" philosophy then you end up removing the restore feature of the backup software, defeating the entire purpose of backup software in the first place.
In other words, just because a feature is used rarely doesn't mean it isn't important to keep around. So much of what's wrong with software these days can be attributed to this "A/B test everything, the data never lies" approach to design.
Just like Android telling me "you haven't used these apps in a while, let's remove them" while the apps are of the use-once-a-year or emergency kind of software.
Telemetry that is not opt-in is not legal, that is the end of it. No amount of justification will change it and no justification should even be present, because spying on people is always wrong unless it is with consent (which is given freely and not as part of some wishy-washy dark pattern corporatism).
I'm not saying this justifies dark patterns, and I have no firsthand knowledge of whether Microsoft is exclusively using this data for legitimate purposes. If it were me I'd enable it by default but make it clear and easy to disable for those who care. That said: I don't think the knee-jerk assumption that this is a wholly evil thing is justified.