Instead of bitching about it, you could very simply and easily fork this entirely open-source project and remove the code. It's literally a single line-change.
Bitching? You kidding me? This is user feedback. Someone posted here to promote the tool out here, and we are asking them to remove it, that becomes bitching? That's insulting from your end.
No need to fork. Just clone and comment the line.
That "bitching" is both constructive criticism and helpful to highlight here in the comments so others may take note.
Maybe you're right and I'm being unfair. It just seems kind of dick-ish - what's wrong with even "Cool, but I don't like stats being collected, please make this opt in"?
That's how I interpreted the OP.
Well, I think it's not constructive criticism. If there were a closed source project, then yes, it would be a very helpful highlight.
This kind of functionality is generally frowned upon in the Free Software world. For example, in Debian, it'd be treated as a bug and patched out. So I disagree; calling it out to inform others is entirely appropriate.