There are at least two distinct issues here this community is concerned about:

1. Telemetry is unethical if the users didn't provide informed consent (opt-in) for it. It's not just a theoretical point - anyone who's worked in tech sector for a while should know most companies cannot be trusted to behave ethically (especially if they took VC funding).

2. There's a certain dysfunction/antipattern that's popular in tech sector, called being a "data-driven company". It's the practice of making decisions through divination from data collected through extensive telemetry, to the exclusion of other knowledge sources (like e.g. actually talking to your users, hallway testing, or thinking things through). This leads to software being optimized in questionable directions - so in a sense, you could say that adding telemetry implies an increased chance the software will become worse over time.

I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business software where the expectation of privacy is already moot.

Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many GDC talks I've watched that discussed player heatmaps, incident (like death) reports, and whatnot used to fine-tune game balance.

There are numerous places where telemetry is completely inappropriate, like one's operating system. An idle computer should indeed be 100% idle, internal housekeeping exempted. (I recently installed freebsd on a new server, did some setup, and basked in the glory of htop showing 32 cores at 0.0% and a root process list that was under a page long. I wish other operating systems could follow that example)

I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better.

Transparency is key here. If projects explained the steps taken to anonymize the data (either provably using Differential Privacy, or approximated via some other means), I feel like people might trust them more. Even with DP, though, the server does see IP addresses, even if it doesn't know what the telemetry is, and that alone might cross the line for some people. Even if the project promises to not log them.

It helps that when you have a front row seat at a butcher's house, you become somewhat averse to eating meat as part of your regular diet. From that perspective, it is really not that surprising.

It’s the difference between always sending something and a pop up asking if you want to send a bug report.

> It is strange that this community of all communities has such a resistance to this idea.

I don't think many people here have any resistance to this. It's simply true. I think a lot of people, though, think that benefit isn't sufficient to overcome the drawbacks.

Because the visual difference between abusive telemetry and benign or useful telemetry is 0. Same with disclosures.

And we are a very abused culture sitting in the middle of what I hope is peak surveillance capitalism.

Beat someone with a stick enough, and when you go to scratch your back and they flinch, it's not sensible to deride them for being irrational.

Precisely. Another commenter said they were shocked to see this community have a negative reaction to telemetry in this instance (and/or generally), and this is why: For-Profit corporations have routinely and repeatedly demonstrated that they should never be given the benefit of the doubt in this area. The developers and engineers in charge of game balance or mechanics may be people we can intellectually relate to and understand the positive value of telemetry, but we more than most should also be aware of how those same people have management to answer to who see something to be abused to improve monetization.

It can be a good thing, yes. Why on earth would anyone assume it would be used and only used in positive, privacy respecting ways in this day and age?

>Identifying how a user dies is a fantastic way to identify items which can be sold to prevent those common deaths.

Just as commonly, it is done to identify bugs and issues, tweak the game balance to get it to a better state, or to see which things players like to do (as opposed to what they say on forums and in focus groups) in order to provide more of similar features.

It is no different from engagement logging in a lot of applications. It is far from always being done for the purpose of monetization. If my business application has a lot of users stuck on a particular screen for prolonged periods of time due to the UX being confusing, I would want to know about it and address it. A lot of times it is hard to gauge how bad it is, because users might just tolerate it if it is ok, or maybe it is something users attribute to their own fault (i.e., they might feel it is just them being confused about it, not that the UX is confusing for everyone). Engagement logging would help me identify that problem and pinpoint it very fast.

>How do you know [they are not using it for monetizing]?

How do you know they are? I am more surprised they didn't have that type of telemetry already for a while, because that's one of the most common ways to identify pain-points in the gameplay balancing, which features might need more attention/rework, identifying potentially very tricky to catch bugs, and come up with ideas for new feature ideas that users might like based on actual data (as opposed to hearsay and public feedback, which can get significantly skewed by selection bias and other factors).

Citation needed. Not every bug will be solved by telemetry, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't be in a very different state without it.

I just meant to say that wherever the line is, I don't think Minecraft telemetry is anything to get angry about.

Well Windows is a little bigger than most apps, wouldn't you say?

I think the software industry as a whole has earned a high degree of distrust on these issues. It's not irrational.

What kind of evil things have they done with the data? Genuinely curious.

Spy is not the purpose for telemetry in most cases.

As if all problems are reproducable at will on all the different set of software / hardware out there ...

This is just speculation on your part? Is that all they were collecting before? And they are not collecting that now. They are collecting:

launcher identifier user identitifer (XUID) client session id (changes on restart) world session id (changes per world load, to be reused for later events) game version operating system name and version Java runtime version if client or server is modded (same information as on crash logs) server type (single player, Realms or other) game mode

“At this point the only implemented event is world load.”

Are you certain about your assertion? Can you link to the document where you found it?

Pretty sure GDPR and CCPA would prevent almost all of that from being stored.

First one that immediately comes to mind is knowing when a person has leisure time. Since email is also known, this gets added to whatever body of data that's been collected on the person with that email. You can already make some inferences about a person just based on when they have leisure time, before you even add it to the existing body of data.

No, I played a fresh game. Latest version at the time (1.16.3 & 1.16.4). Checked a wiki whilst playing so to make sure I wasn't missing major new stuff.

I can't agree that the additions have been "enormous". Not for 10 years. And if you've seen one mineshaft or stronghold or underwater temple, you've seen them all. No variation.

There's of course something to be said about staying true to the purity of the gameplay experience (like, say, DOTA2, but the depth and replayability there is in strategy, not content), but that feels like the wrong approach to a game that's in a large part about exploring like Minecraft.

Far more importantly than "original gameplay" although there are deviations that would matter enormously for e.g. speed running, you can't mod Bedrock.

I don't actually play vanilla (unmodified) PC Minecraft more than perhaps a few minutes every year to see what's new or test something in the vanilla program.

But I spent hours every month playing packs like Compact Claustrophobia (a pack where you spend all except the last section of the "plot" trapped inside Compact Machines, pocket universes which don't exist in the vanilla game at all but are fairly popular in modding). Or say Seaopolis which starts out in a vast world-covering ocean but eventually allows you to do space travel.

Mojang and then Microsoft did some basic work to enable this, but a huge part of it comes from the core being Java, and so once modding is allowed it's possible to reach inside an object and replace parts of the game wholesale. And from the contingent popularity and huge community that took this and really ran with it.

Modding enables people to focus on the type of play they most enjoy. If you wish the game had more tricky combat and needed survival skills, you can have that. If you'd rather become a God-like being and form the world as it should be, you can have that. If you like problem solving, you can spend all your time building complicated machines to solve increasingly dubious problems (e.g. don't think "automatically farm carrots" think "automatically farm dragon eggs").

When software transmits usage off device silently without consent from the user, in ways that benefit a remote party and do not benefit the user: that's spyware.

It all depends on if informed consent was obtained first. Anything that is collecting data about me or my use of my machines without my informed consent is spying in any context.

I don't really mind this. There is no impact to me by having this telemetry in place.

Yeah I thought so too, but reading the ticket they linked it looks like in a specific version of Minecraft, strongholds we’re not being generated at all?

I only recently started playing Minecraft again after years. Last time I played it, The End did not exist yet in Minecraft. Back then we used to joke about “winning Minecraft”. Also, lava used to be an infinite resource if you built a cross and filled each corner with lava, you could then take infinite lava out from the middle which was neat. But they decided to remove that for some reason.

Anyway, bugs happen and I think the GP is wrong to suggest that telemetry is not helpful. Being able to see how people actually use the software is how Microsoft has done it since many many years AFAIK. And it helps Microsoft to develop better software.

There are many things I don’t like about Microsoft and I don’t use their Windows operating system almost at all. But I think they still got a lot right about how to develop software.