Users are not your experimental group. This attitude should have died years ago, latest with the GDPR.
One is optimizing/improving experience based on anonymous data, the other is building user profiles for targeted ads.
Mapbox is a fantastic example of mass data aggregation of users that has been anonymized.
EDIT: Why should we do clinical studies on medicines when that could be invasive to a persons privacy collecting such personal information? Is it necessarily wrong? Tools can be used for good and evil, that's the problem here, not the tool itself.
Clinical trials require informed consent and institutional review. Regulating software telemetry like other human subject research would make privacy advocates very happy.
I explicitly said what I'm talking about isn't necessarily directly applicable to amazon kindle. I also agreed with you regarding software telemetry being used responsibly and irresponsibly.
So I'll repeat I don't see where we disagree.