I'm absolutely all for privacy and limiting unnecessary gathering of data. But there's nuances to this discussion and labeling everything that has any amount of telemetry as "Spyware" does not do anyone any good.
Maybe it's not "hurr durr" and people have a legitimate reason to hold that opinion. To those people, any distinction between spyware and "good" telemetry is merely academic and effectively irrelevant.
My favorite part is when someone figures out "telemetry" includes the MAC address, and the dev team just goes completely silent.
There's an honest, non sneaky way of gathering usage information: pay for rigorous testing and price the cost into the product. Telemetry is lazy, invasive, and user hostile by default. Every bit of information acquired from users should be given with informed consent or not collected at all.
It's hard to really stand up to that kind of situation.
Hashed MAC address: a cryptographically (SHA256) anonymous and unique ID for a machine.
Although I disagree that they should have this to begin with, it being anonymized is still a pretty important detail.
The fact that they are taking uniquely identifiable information from you, and the fact that their company is as deep in the Ad game as Google, is more than damning enough.
"hurr durr" strawmen on the other hand...