I get that data collection has become a contentious issue and I'm a vocal opponent of this trend, but this seems rather harmless, no?
It's an offer to purely voluntarily provide telemetry on non-personal data, no strings attached.
It's an offer to purely voluntarily provide telemetry on non-personal data, no strings attached.
Or buy a report from one of the hundreds of companies doing this kind of user tracking.
There’s no great reason why they would need to begin collecting data on each of their users.
They wouldn't have access to the frequency of visits, an important factor.
> There’s no great reason why they would need to begin collecting data on each of their users.
I've given you one above.
Also, it's not "each of their users", it's those voluntarily agreeing to submit this information (as opposed to "you need to install X to unlock feature Y", and installing an executable.
The same way having a few sparklers in your closet safe enough, having a few websites of your users is safe. But when you have a huge cache of personal data from large numbers of users, it becomes attractive to foreign governments, foreign gangs, feature creep from questionable law enforcement practices under a corporate surveillance state, unethical domestic lawyers, script kiddies, and so on. It's like having a whole fireworks store in your closet... It just keeps getting harder and harder to store safely the more information you collect!
And you're not totally wrong- at least they're doing the right thing and making this opt-in. However, this collection appears to be one done by a bunch of GPU nerds, which raises warnings that it won't be protected as well as, say, google doc data.