Evaluation

This week's reading put me in mind of the Steam content delivery system's fabled statistics gathering functionality.

Steam is a framework for buying, downloading, and playing various games. It is rumored that, behind the scenes, there is massive data collection in place, sending back reports of what players are doing in the games, presumably to help improve the experience. It's not talked about, but occasionally Valve, the company that makes Steam, will release an update that fixes something, citing their statistics gathering as the tip off that there was a problem.

I can only imagine this kind of information gathering becoming more and more useful, as computers are becoming pretty much always online, and software updates are being done automatically in the background. For Steam, since the data being collected is recreational, there are no real privacy concerns (presumably, they don't send back personally identifying information, though really, no one knows for sure,) but for other applications, this could be a problem.

However, with the right EULA and the right data retention policy, this risk could be mitigated.

On the other hand, speaking as a paranoid end user, I'm thankful for my outgoing firewall.