Everyone _says_ they want choices, but to a first approximation the number of people who change the defaults in any computer program is so close to zero that if the numbers were the only thing that mattered, user choice - provably, measurably - would not matter. But it does matter.

Furthermore: if people depend on your product - not just use but _depend_ on it - then you need to know how that product operates or fails in real-world use.

If you have a large enough user base that people depend, for whatever personal, safety or security reasons, on your product, then I believe you have a positive obligation to those people to protect them from risks and failures they might never see or understand.

Not because anyone's dumb or incompetent, but because those threat actors make every effort to be invisible to their victims and impossible to understand to defenders.

And the combination of those two things means that if you are a big enough, important enough software project, then you can't rely on bug reports or random ragesite comments to tell you when your product is failing. You have to have telemetry. It can't be opt-in because in any scale that matters _opt-anything doesn't exist_.

And if you also care about protecting privacy, then you start walking a burning tightrope.

That's the job.

These same conversations happened when Mozilla introduced in-product telemetry; nobody even remembers it now, but the arguments then were exactly the same.

And then, like now, I think that the naive absolutism of free software culture, the refusal to engage with questions like this, are one of the root-cause reasons that the FSF/OSI crowd have sat out this century's most important software engineering conversations.

To give you a sense of the ground that's been lost in that absolutism, I'd like to tell you a story about Early Mozilla.

I'm going to elide some names and embellish it a bit, partly because I've only heard myself second- or third-hand and partly because like telling a good story, but as parables go I think it's informative.

It's about automatic in-product updates, before those existed anywhere.

Way, way back in the day, there were two ideological camps at Moz on the topic of software updating.

One camp believed in the idea of positive obligations of user protection; that developers had an obligation to proactively keep users protected from an increasingly dangerous and growing web.

The other camp saw any less-than-consensual changes to somebody's computing environment as a personal violation, akin to a physical violation.