"Now, I think the incentive structures for FOSS projects are a little different such that the FOSS environment isn't going to converge on the idea of collecting

"Now, I think the incentive structures for FOSS projects are a little different such that the FOSS environment isn't going to converge on the idea of collecting such data. But clearly, throw any sort of system that wants to make money into the mix, coupled with the fact that users just refuse to pay for software anymore, and every giganto corp from Mozilla to Canonical are going to independently come to the same conclusion of collecting this sort of data." Making money from either advertising or additional services are definitely incentives. The other one worth mentioning is that trying to make platforms popular with users drives integrating on-line services as well as using more information from the user to deliver advanced services. At the moment local applications are at a disadvantage compared to on-line ones because they don't have as much data to do clever things with: Gmail vs Thunderbird is a good example. General users want the convenience of services like digital assistants - and while some of it can be done with local processing, some cannot.