I believe everyone is entitled to their view on privacy, whether that's "expose all data" or "remain completely anonymous", but there's an interesting collision presented here.
> if a guest at my house is live-streaming his stay to the Internet without my knowledge or approval
Would you consider live-streaming to be audio-visual streaming or literally any data that could remotely indicate the guest is in your presence / property?
And, as a follow up, in case it's the latter: do you require guests to put phones into Airplane mode or similar?
As in, is there a particular type of data, or information about your app usage that you don't want developers having access to?
I worked at a trading company before, and one of the reasons we pushed out telemetry was due to user's feature requests - users would request features, and we wanted to see if they were actually using them, so that we could prioritise developer time accordingly.
That is a concrete example of how this data is useful.
I am curious about any concrete examples from the other side.
Maybe there's no data you're afraid of leaking, but you would prefer never to leak that data. It's a consumer choice - the problem here is lack of transparency/information to the consumer.
The cultural standard is what we accept to be appropriate - do we want to accept a cultural standard of everything you use is tracked and logged by default?
We shouldn't automatically assume people are stupid, or that they are being "duped".
There are numerous advantages to using a cloud-hosted service - if you tried to replicate Gmail or Dropbox, to the same level of reliability, performance and sharing features - the engineering effort alone would probably stump many of us.
Once again - is there a concrete fear here from application developers knowing how we use their applications? And is it one that we think people are somehow unaware of?
You presented a very weird case to begin with by implying that the reason people wouldn't want to be tracked is 'fear'. Why?
Maybe you're really just saying "Okay, ignoring all the other reasons why you might not like tracking: Are there any inherent flaws in tracking/something we can do to make this more trustworthy", but right now I feel as if you're presenting a weird "Either you consent to us tracking you or you fear something (specific)" choice.
I mean, isn't the whole point of these services that you store your data remotely on their services?
Why would you voluntarily choose to use something like Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Dropbox etc, if you were concerned about the company in question or didn't trust them?
There are companies I won't use, precisely because of concerns like this (e.g. Sony, Lenovo) - but if somebody chooses to use a service, it's probably because the benefits of that service outweigh the "costs" to them.
In the case of Amazon Underground, which is the subject of the OP, I think it's a bit disingenuous to say, oh gee, I want free paid apps, but I don't want to allow Amazon to track my usage....which is sort of how the app developers get re-compensated.
Assuming you have voluntarily chosen to use a webapp or mobile app what are the key objections around those developers collecting telemetry data from you?
I suspect you're catering to a certain market (i.e. those willing to fork out either 450 EUR and put up with some rough edges, or willing to setup the VM themselves), but I applaud your effort. Good on you mate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique
Will I be "scared" if a guest at my house is live-streaming his stay to the Internet without my knowledge or approval? Hell, no. I'll be pissed.
Now, that's exactly naive, careless and fundamentally ignorant comment that the erosion of privacy is all about. You seem to genuienly think that tracking is not just acceptable, but a norm in some situatioons.
Not just several years ago if an OS or an app phoned home it was a scandal. It was commonly accepted that your gadget was yours, and anything running on it was a guest that had to follow some decency and basic etiquette norms. Theh, the push started - can we report this, just once? Can we report that, weekly? We'll call it a "telemetry", it's less scary that way. Perhaps you are getting tired of pushing OK, shall we do it automatically? OK, so we'll now just default to automatic. and make it hard to disable. Heck, we'll just build it in, because nobody now seems to be giving a fuck anyway.
But here's the best part - we now even have users who are campaigning on our behalf to not give a fuck. That's just grand.