A/B testing is in fact often used to make insanely great product, how would you otherwise know what your users actually want

Perhaps understanding the problem deeply, thoroughly and putting yourself in the shoes of the customer insteading throwing a bunch of semi-random iterations over the fence and squeezing every last bit of data from the customer's private behavior?

Imagine if I buy tomatoes from the grocery store, but they run an A/B testing on me to see what the customer wants - may be I prefer the 85% ripe ones over 95% ripe ones, the farmers watch the reaction of their users as they cook and taste tomatoes in a live video stream from their customer's home. WTF, get out of my house (browser). It is my private property. I just want a goddamn tomato (send an email or post a photo or read news).

What happened to user's privacy? That last mile optimization is bothering me as a user.

> how would you otherwise know what your users actually want

E.g. with regular user testing.

Probably not applicable everywhere, but could replace a/b testing for some products.