On 03/07/12 03:18, Justin Dolske wrote:
> That might be, but I think it's an assumption worth challenging (in the
> intellectual, where-is-the-line really sense)!
Sure :-)
> So far as privacy invasions go it's pretty minor. I presume all the
> other major/popular "app" platforms are doing similar things to some
> degree (and likely in a more brazen fashion, given their histories).
Well, other platforms have app stores, and obviously they know what
you've downloaded. On iPhone, therefore, Apple knows pretty much every
app everyone has installed (except developers). On Android, though, one
can install 3rd party apps, perhaps via another store. Does Google get
sent details of those? (Genuine question; I don't know.)
And even if they do know what apps you have installed, they don't know
which ones you use and for how long (which the telemetry data would tell
us).
> I would submit that it's well withing the realm of consideration, as
> long as we're (1) careful and responsible in what we collect (as
> Telemetry is today in Firefox), and (2) we have have an appropriate
> privacy policy in place (saying that it's all aggregated, and there's no
> per-user tracking).
Aggregated on a per-app basis? Surely it would need to be more
fine-grained than that; you can't lump together telemetry measurements
from wildly disparate hardware. And what if you have a few outliers
where performance is poor, and want to look at them individually in more
detail?
If such restrictions are part of the deal we make when we turn this on,
we need to remember that, and not then loosen them later because the
data is tempting.
> Also, Web Apps are basically a new thing with new
> (and likely often unformed) expectations.
I'm not sure that's an argument for either side. If what we are
proposing is not a good thing for other reasons, then the idea that we
may be able to get users to swallow it because they have unformed
expectations is not reassuring! :-)
Gerv