This article is about a fairly large sized tech company adopting a fairly recent but increasingly mainstream & popular tool that helps them understand their operations. It'll give them a standard way to see what their computers are doing, across their various systems.
OpenTelemetry is one of the key emerging cloud standards, and I expect many many many many more articles like this going forwards, from all kinds of companies.
As for concerns about user tracking & privacy, that's not generally what these operational tools are used for. I haven't heard of a single case of them being used for user tracking or behavioral analytics. Thusfar these are purely operational tools, to understand the health of systems, to debug & typically to understand what happens to an incoming request as it works through dozens of systems & services to get processed. That said, I tend to think over time the importance of this distributed after-the-fact log we are building is going to become inverted. That we will start to see the potential to harvest these records for analytics, and more generally, to forward-feed them into other processes to automatically build & advance Event Sourcing systems. Right now these systems are relatively pure & good, but what's really at stake here is that we've been doing computing blind, with no record of what's happened, and OpenTelemetry is a key first step in lifting that veil of ignorance as to what computing has happened. We are beginning to capture the data of what compute occurred. Many things will emerge as we open this box.