Spying on your users does not give better feedback than simply asking your users (surveys, focus groups) and responding to the considered comments you receive. Spying and trying to infer intent is such a low bar to improve upon.

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willsmith72 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Spying on your users does not give better feedback than simply asking your users

If that's true, there are many companies paying thousands -hundreds of thousands unnecessarily. Why are they choosing to throw away their money?

	▲	msgodel a day ago \| parent [-]
		Companies blow money on bad ideas all the time. Middle managers love analytics because it lets them win internal arguments, not because it actually solves problems.

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throwaway7783 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It is not an either or. Surveys are almost always ignored. Micro improvements cannot be done with just surveys and asking users. Often users do not know how to describe a problem. Product analytics, if anonymized with opt-out gives a pretty good picture of intent, especially in B2B software.

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adastra22 2 days ago | parent [-]

Analytics cannot be anonymized.

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throwaway7783 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Why?

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adastra22 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Any complex dataset has enough revealing information as to make deanonimization possible. To truly muddle the waters enough to make such attempts impossible would require injecting enough noise as to make the analytics useless to learn from.

This is a fundamental property derived from information theory, but also confirmed time after time in practice: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/23/anonymise...

Data anonymization is a myth sold to politicians to whitewash data collection.

	▲	throwaway7783 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but that is broader than product analytics and applies to all data collection. The word I should have used is "pseudonymize". The goal for capturing product analytics is not to deanonimize but understand usage trends/bottlenecks.