"Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"

They were losing hearts and minds in the Web dev space by waging war against open source. It makes far more sense to co-opt it, as per the Halloween-document strategy.

TBH I saw this coming 20 or so years ago, about the time when IBM started putting on its open-source cheerleader outfit. Open source is formless, shapeless, like water per Bruce Lee. You cannot oppose it with force, it will just get everywhere; but by aligning yourself with it you can direct it. That's what I saw IBM doing and I knew Microsoft would follow suit out of lack of choice. And now here we are.

Enabled by default -> Bad

Give user option to enable to improve product -> Good

Telemetry is malware. Always has been.

My concern is that anybody at a company can suggest a telemetry point and it's added with little or no oversight, and store it forever. It may not be a fun engineering challenge (though it could be, depending on the metric), but sifting through the results is a "fun data interpretation" event. Especially for marketing and sales groups.

The solutions should have a privacy nuance... but don't. For example from TFA, collecting git branch and repo names. That seems like a terrible idea, since it's not like Microsoft's devs will have access to reproduce issues from those repos. It's also a potential leak of sensitive corporate data.

Factory farming is also an engineering challenge, with legitimate business reasons - its way more economical. I think most of the time horrible things just make sense, in some other framing.

My point is - something being useful is a very low bar. It's not the point of the discussion here. Maybe some privacy zealots won't acknowledge this, but telemetry can be very useful, and at the same time a breach of privacy.

And regarding Microsoft, it's also about their attitude towards it. It's their way or the highway. It has always been like this - the software might be the way it is, but regarding their business dealings they are and always were ruthless. That's what made them great. So now what we see is a continuation of their previous attitude. And a slice of the current zeitgeist which is always-on internet with everyone slurping up user data.

Telemetry can be an invaluable source of information to improve products, everyone knows that; it's sorta like having 100% of the users continuously reporting bugs and information from which software vendors can infer most wanted features or modifications to improve usability. Which business wouldn't want that? If done right it could be great for everyone, including users. Unfortunately there's no way to ensure that invaluable tool won't one day be used against users to sneak out data that wouldn't contribute in any way to products improvement, namely making profits from users profiling.

But the point isn't being good or evil; businesses have no sense of morals, they don't obey to common sense but rather take the path that leads to the higher profits, and these days profiling users unfortunately brings high profits. It's not a matter of which company is good or bad, or if telemetry can be done right or not, but rather how long until a software with built in telemetry will use it the wrong way, because soon or later everyone of them will be presented the scenario in which doing a bad thing brings them more profits; and this principle applies way beyond telemetry.