The Daily Telegraph once put heat monitors under everyone's desk. There was an outcry among the employees about this, and the explanation from the Telegraph was it was part of their HVAC system, and allowed the air conditioner and heater to smartly determine which parts of the building needed more heating and cooling due to more human activity going on in those parts.

Under the most charitable interpretation of the above, the Telegraph meant what it said, and only ever intended to use the data thus collected to optimize HVAC output to only those areas with enough human activity to warrant it.

But, you see, once they had the data about who was at their desk and who wasn't, it behooves them to act on it.

Except the privacy policy clearly states what Microsoft users this data for. You can go around flailing your hands in constant paranoia or you can actually give an evidence of wrongdoing and sue the shit out of them.

But why wait for evidence when posting "Micro$oft is evil" is more fun?

> But why wait for evidence when posting "Micro$oft is evil" is more fun?

But that’s not at all what they said. The argument they used applies to anyone collecting data. Just like in the example they used.

And while you are right about the privacy policy stating what the data is used for, what is there to prevent companies from changing their privacy policy at any point in time? And if they change it, are they required to inform you that the privacy policy has changed?

> And while you are right about the privacy policy stating what the data is used for, what is there to prevent companies from changing their privacy policy at any point in time? And if they change it, are they required to inform you that the privacy policy has changed?

For Europeans there is the GDPR.

This is also one of the things that AFAIK should be covered by the GDPR (contrary to the cookie banners with opt out that I personally expect will get their punishments soon.)

Also, the first thing you see when you launch for the first time is a notification about this functionality and simple opt-out instructions. I guess ideally it would be opt-in but I definitely wouldn't classify this as sinister.

VS Code seems to have driven a lot of improvement to features most important to users based on this data.

Gmail is hosted so my interactions are necessarily sent to the server. I don’t begrudge apps examining the data necessary to perform their actions. (However spying on e.g. how I move the mouse is too far.)

Desktop apps are offline and so this is just gross. Make the app good by having a vision and employing domain experts, not trying to drive button click metrics or whatever.

They do spy on how you move the mouse though. But it's all to detect "automated traffic", you see.

I have never seen this work.

The ribbon was built in large part based on telemetry. Say what you will, but it does it's job very well, provided you approach it with an open mind.

You mean later versions? Because I'm not aware they A/B tested it in the market before they launched the first one.

They did a lot of usability testing on the first iteration as well. They didn't test it in the market, since it didn't exist in a product yet, but they tested it. Jensen Harris [−π] has a large number of blog posts on the development and design history of that particular UI and a lot of information on why they have done things a certain way.

[−π]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of...

The first version I can remember was amazingly bad.

I remember the file menu operations being hidden behind the round logo in the upper left corner.

I like the ribbons, at least in MS products.

Yeah, it's a tricky interface. It works best in applications with a ton of commands and it really needs a good UX team to pore over it and do user group studies. I've seen some (IMO) failed versions from smaller software vendors.

The Microsoft ones are pretty good, for me at least :)