Etcher tracks user data without consent

Etcher seems to be an USB flasher. The linked issue says that it phones home on startup, but there's no analysis regarding what it sends. This could be usage tracking or an update check.

While the reporter is correct that some users don't want this to happen, it doesn't look that unusual or dangerous. "Secretly spies" is unnecessarily inflammatory, I would say.

Looking at the GitHub history of the reporter, he seems to be opening quite a lot of issues like this one (asking projects to stop recommending Etcher or complaining about Netdata). He's also advertising his own standard for disabling telemetry across different applications: https://consoledonottrack.com/. That idea has some merit, maybe, but I don't really like such an aggressive approach.

Any automatic update check would classify as "secretly spying" according to this report. This is nonsense.

As others have indicated, this is just an auto-update check.

https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/blob/master/lib/gui/etch...

This makes me very curious as to the motivation behind such an inflammatory issue report. Does this individual work for a competitor, or have some other issue with balena?

He also wants removal Etcher from Brew: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/pull/73195