When did logging and reporting become "telemetry"?
Telemetry is generally for the benefit of the marketing team, law enforcement and development team.
Edit: have been doing software since the mid-nineties. You can downvote all you want, but this is a more recent usage.
The opt-in thing is fine, but some of us are still stuck, I guess, on older standards for software ethics, and find it entirely unacceptable and alarming that opt-out was ever proposed in the first place, about as bad as if they'd proposed adding an opt-out bitcoin miner to it to help fund the project—it's disturbing they'd consider that OK to even propose.
(some time in the back half of the '00s, I reckon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry
Look at that list under Applications. What makes software so different that it shouldn't be included?
Though at this point it's been widespread long enough that I suppose it's just a normal term that's "always been used", to some developers, not a new, alien-feeling part of the software lexicon.
Microsoft OTOH calls their data collection the "Customer Experience Improvement Program" - now THAT is whitewashing.
It's only been a decade or so now that you could rely on most computers always having an internet connection. That's probably why the term feels new - it only started being used when the practice became technically feasible. Maybe others remember things differently. /shrug
Like neural networks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History
Sounds super-fancy and advanced, but when you dig in it's like, "oh, that's all?"