The sad bit is that (some reasonable) telemetric data is really, really useful for software engineering. If you have a large enough program, of course it'll hav

The sad bit is that (some reasonable) telemetric data is really, really useful for software engineering. If you have a large enough program, of course it'll have way more bugs than you could ever fix. Crash tracking and usage analytics is how you make a data driven decision on what to fix, and what to ignore. This enables a data driven approach to software quality that's a huge improvement. Having worked on projects that did and did not have telemetrics, working without them feels absurd - it seems like you're just randomly fixing the side mirror on a car without any idea what's actually broken on it (independently of your overall testing posture). Vendors tracking excessive information without proper disclosure destroy this information source for those developers that try to collect reasonable information (with consent, disclosure, in context, etc).