Privacy

32424 readers

335 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

839

All Proton Drive apps are now open source (proton.me)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

88 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm curious, any advice on that? How does one do "good" telemetry? I'm the first to complain about Microsoft, Apple, (even worst) Google, Meta and now OpenAI collecting data to sell me stuff... but it's true that also some data is needed to get some kind of introspection in terms of usage. Developers need to understand what is actually happening with the software they develop.

Now I'm wondering specifically about 2 side :

how to do the data collection correctly (e.g local only, only send on crash, only send without PII, store only aggregate)
how to get informed consent from users (e.g off by default, UX that supports understanding of why it's done and how)

I'm genuinely glad that the mindset around privacy have changed since the last few years but I'm wondering how, when it's a genuinely positive good case (to truly make better products), to do it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Your app has a button on its front page. No one ever presses that button. With good telemetry, you will know this and remove the button. The only thing you need to know is how many times each user opens the app and how many times they tapped that button. Crash reports can include the causes of errors. Without this data the app might have that unused button there forever and crash everytime anyone taps the donate button and you wouldnt know why you arent getting any dontaions.

Telemetry is usually collected on non metered networks. Usually it is opt-out by default, set by the user in the apps settings. Personally, I'd inform the user of this and let them decice on first startup.