The improvements were stumbles in the dark by comparison — people didn’t even realise colour blindness existed until the industrial revolution.
That said, while I am fine with automated bug tracking for this sort of goal, I absolutely agree that all automated tracking needs to be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Yeah, while I'm not a fan of involuntary data collection it completely makes sense why firms do it. Unskewing data collected in voluntary and self reported scenarios is a treacherous and sometimes impossible undertaking.
Edit: Often times we're not talking about the difference between good data and really good data. We're talking about the difference between useful and useless data.
That said, while I am fine with automated bug tracking for this sort of goal, I absolutely agree that all automated tracking needs to be opt-in rather than opt-out.