You're making a huge jump from "gathering anonymous counters to understand how many people use the thing" to "harvest all the data you want and monetize it".

If they were tracking my identity across sites and actually selling it to the highest bidder that's one thing that we'll definitely agree on. This is so so far from that.

You're welcome to build and use your own MCP browser automation if you're so hostile to the developer that built something cool and free for you to use.

The supply chain vulnerability in any extension is obvious. The problems with telemetry - any at all - are wide ranging and it's crazy to me that people don't see this.

Any covert, involuntary, automatic surveillance of a person for any reason whatsoever should have a court order and legal authority behind it - it's gross and exposes the target to vulnerabilities they're not cognizant of.

For telemetry tracking user behavior to be useful at all, it's got to be associated with a user. The idea of telemetry anonymization is marketing speak for "we obfuscated it, we know deanonymization is trivial, but people are stupid, especially regulators."

Any anonymization done is sufficiently obfuscated such that corporate asses get covered in the case of any regulatory investigation. There's no legitimate, mathematically valid anonymization of user data that you could do without destroying the information that you're trying to get in the first place through these tools. This means that any aggregation of user data useful to a malicious actor will inevitably be compromised - the second Posthog or Amplitude become a desirable target, they'll get pwned and breached, and much handwringing will be done, and there will be no recourse or recompense for damages done.

The only strategy to prevent the dissemination of surveillance data is not to collect it in the first place. It should be illegal to collect the data without voluntary, user initiated participation, and any information collected should be ephemeral with regular inspection to ensure compliance. Any violation of user privacy should result in crippling fines, something like 5% of the value of the company per user per day of violation - if you can't responsibly manage the data, you shouldn't be collecting it.

This means all the automatic continuous development a/b testing intrusive corner cutting corporate bullshit would have to stop. Continually leaking surveillance data to malicious actors year over year with no repercussions has thoroughly demonstrated that people cannot be trusted with safekeeping data.

I will build and use my own automation if I need to, based on products that don't covertly, involuntarily, ignorantly surveil their users, without even being aware of potential for harm, and I'll continue to point it out when it shows up in random projects and products, because it's wrong and it should stop.

We should stop embracing the things that enshittify the world, and stop sacrificing things like "other people's privacy" for convenience or profit.

Thanks for pushing for a realignment of product expectations. I agree.