Analytics can be done less granularly and still benefit the user. Also, surely not every data point collected is used to benefit the user.

For example, Amazon doesn't need to know where I am when I request a definition or translation. If they're concerned about usage, they only need to know how many times I actually used one or both of those features per day, per week, or month. They don't need to know instantly every single time a word is highlighted.

> Analytics can be done less granularly and still benefit the user. Also, surely not every data point collected is used to benefit the user.

How? For all we know, it isn't granular - it might be aggregated at the server level to hide specific user's actions. But they'd still need to be sending in the data from the device to the server.

The device could keep a daily count of interesting actions, and sync that to analytics servers on a daily or weekly basis. That preserves 95% of legitimate use cases while leaking much less private data (like how my reading habits are distributed across the day)

I mean, you're still collecting most of the problematic data. And you might legitimately be interested in what you're leaving out - knowing time of day that people do things is actually important for plenty of use cases.

They can but they're often much more than that.

Also it should really be opt in. Our at least opt out. I hate Amazon looking over my shoulder while reading a book.

That's why I don't use their reading app and use a custom OS.

The word choice we want here is directly vs. indirectly.

I'm surprised you'd say that. Out of interest, how does analytics help websites not use blathery, unhelpful text in overly-small fonts, done too-pale to make them unreadable. A lot of UI failings are of this most basic kind.

When you play an online slot game where you bet money that some numbers will appear on screen, and they use analytics to "improve user experience" (read: engagement, read: you losing more money), is that benefiting you or is it benefiting them?