Telemetry
There was a time when telemetry, that is on by default, would have been called spyware. Now it’s business as usual and you are a luddite if you don’t like it. Even many FOSS projects seem to be fine with it. I wonder how that happened.
2025-03-29 · 1 year ago · 👍 fab, Thisideup
7 Comments ↓
It happened the same way as people become used to Chrome instead of Firefox or now even better LibreWolf. Normies don't think about such things, they don't have concept of online privacy, I guess.
🐐 drh3xx · 2025-03-29 at 11:51:
Also concerning the amount of money the US government were giving to the likes of the TOR project and Mozilla. You don't give tax payer money in return for nothing. Pretty sure a significant portion of TOR nodes are operated by various governments anyway along with (or at least having their claws in) many free VPN offerings. Very wary of anything pitched as privacy focused nowadays. Modern governments tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to tech: 1) They're either the ones committing the biggest known online hacks or abuses of tech. 2) They're doing worse and we just don't know the details yet. Only real reason Quantum Computing is so heavily funded is it would end privacy for the common man.
👻 darkghost · 2025-03-29 at 13:11:
It's crazy to think about when I was young and wasn't being constantly monitored.
🦂 zzo38 · 2025-03-29 at 18:43:
My own FOSS projects do not have telemetry (and do not even have an option to enable it if you want it), and I will also try to disable or avoid other software that does. I do keep server logs but only of what would be sent to the server anyways, not by trying to force the client to send additional stuff.
🚀 lanterm · 2025-03-30 at 12:43:
My opinion is ad tech is largely how it happened. How would one know which ad campaign to pay out on if you don't know which impression on one platform led a user to purchase a product on another one? This promised insight encourages businesses to keep tracking scripts and telemetry on by default. It's so pervasive it feels impossible to maintain some kind of baseline of online privacy, which is kind of nuts to me - we're online in the most sensitive or private of situations in our lives, yet it's become one of the places we're observed and tracked the most.
I think someone who comes up with some ethical advertising that doesn't involve this pervasive tracking should win a Nobel peace prize.
👻 darkghost · 2025-03-30 at 13:44:
You will find me trashing the ad industry more than any other. They're the least ethical lot you'll find.
🌧️ deafpolygon · 2025-08-09 at 10:35:
it's called boiling the frog. also, during the time that it would have been called spyware - a good portion of internet users were more educated, due to the internet being more accessible to colleges, military, etc.