Do you use brew? Have you contributed code to it? Have you installed something using brew, before updating brew for a while?

For me, my answers are yes no yes. A while ago, you did that, and you get an old version of the thing you just installed. With analytics, they saw that many people forget to update before installing after a while, so they added an update step in that case.

I call that progress, no matter how small. I didn't change that and to you didn't change that. The brew devs changed that. Maybe they would have changed it anyway later.. Who knows. But the fact that brew because a tiny tiny bit better because of analytics, in part from me, makes me a happier user. Now I don't need to remember to update before installing.

Of course it's not the best way to "contribute", but it's something. Definitely better than "contributing" your data to companies, like you said.