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.