Comment by charcircuit
Comment by charcircuit 4 days ago
You could say the same about Microsoft's telemetry in Windows which this article is complaining about due to it being opt in. The telemtry's purpose is to improve user's experience by allowing Microsoft to make the product better by knowing where things are going wrong or if they are making harmful changes.
Telemetry is a lot harder of a sell if you're talking about "improving the user experience". Whereas Clippy was a case of "we assume this will help UX for new users -> it seems pretty harmless -> include it in our product", something like telemetry can only be simplified to "having mountains of telemetry data will help us because 0.0001% of it may be useful in resolving an issue -> this 0.0001% is so useful that every user should by default uplink their actions to Microsoft, regardless of any privacy concerns (which we know of ahead of time) -> enable it for everyone, they need to sacrifice a bit for the greater good". The intentions behind the two are similar only if you look at them in broadest possible terms.