telemetry
This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it with relevant information.
telemetry is the collection and reporting of application usage discussed for possible use in Omnibear or other Indieweb community projects. It is a form of analytics tied more to application development compared to the typical traffic focus of website analytics.
Why
Telemetry allows automated reporting for use in debugging and product development decisions. It provides more detail than is voluntarily given via channels like Github issues.
Articles
Brainstorming
Opt-in vs opt-out
Anthony Ciccarello notes that opt-in has low usage
Tantek Çelik suggests options to encourage opt-in and how to address privacy concerns 2025-12-02
- Offer to provide the user with summary stats of what you're learning from their usage for their own curiosity / interest. That helps demystify "what are you tracking" and shows good faith in providing user value and not just being "extractive"
- Figure out a broader request for "please help support this open source project in one or more of the following ways: telemetry, bug reporting, feature requests, donations etc." When placed in that sort of contract, of a donation / support for the project, that helps tell the user a story about why they're doing it to feel good about giving back
- You could also make it semi-opt-out where upon first run (or upon usage after a week?) you show a "please help support this project" message/alert like that with a bunch of checkboxes but only the "telemetry" one checked by default and all the others there unchecked. Then the user can decide sure that's reasonable, or maybe they want to donate their time/money differently
- Also be clear about ease of turning it off whenever and where to do that
- And up front note default data retention/deletion policy, as well as an option to delete data after the fact
- Lastly figure out the design of what to do if they ever uninstall