Because no network connection is anonymous but as long as you aren't handling PII, GDPR has nothing to say about it.
I could sell an app in the EU that just pinged my server once a day. As long as I wasn't keeping a record of who pinged what when, there is no PII.
Otherwise everything is PII and you would need consent before every TCP handshake.
Data processing is not just about 'keeping a record'. Processing even for a millisecond is also processing.
> Otherwise everything is PII and you would need consent before every TCP handshake.
Consent is not the only ground for data processing. Normally, it would just be performance of a contract, as the user wants something from you.
Data processing of personal data is what the GDPR is concerned about.
I'm sorry for getting frustrated but for fucks sake, someone cite me something that proves my original point about the opt-out being illegal.
I don't care if I'm wrong but I'm not taking downvotes for questioning someone flatly accusing 1P of bypassing EU regulations.
It is clear that the EU does not consider telemetry to be strictly necessary and while there can be times when telemetry is allowable with the legitimate interest legal basis (for example, to prevent fraud or to comply with legal obligations), there is already plenty of case law across the EU that shows that the legitimate interest legal basis will not be accepted for user analytics.
For this reason, it seems unlikely that the proposed telemetry will be compliant in the EU.
It's not the network connection that eliminates anonymity (although that, too), but the data itself. Even if there's no single piece of PII involved, fingerprinting is still a thing. That's why, if you want a hope at anonymity, you have to add the collected data into an aggregate collection and delete the original data records.