The fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) against telemetry is unfortunately more sad than the FUD against Flatpak. I was already thinking of writing an article about telemetry is not evil last year, but I'll have to expand on how opt-in telemetry and "just ask your users" don't work well in practice.
New article "Opt-in Telemetry and Asking Users for Feedback May Not Work in Practice":
Telemetry is one of the biggest controversial topics in the Linux community. Many people believe that telemetry is entirely meaningless, because developers can “just” ask their users. Some people also argue that users can opt into telemetry if they want to participate, but most of these users are in consensus that opt-out telemetry shouldn’t be there in the first place.
However, I don’t believe that asking users or explicitly opting into telemetry helps to a degree where developers and designers can form educated conclusions, as both methods share many issues regarding gathering data accurately. In this article, we’re going to explore the issues around asking users and opting into telemetry, and then I will explain why opt-out telemetry is a better approach to gather accurate data and forming educated conclusions.
I liked your article. Even tough my position is in favor of opt-in.
As contribution there. Is a linux distro that has had opt in telemetry for years now, Debian. You can do it during the install process or join after install.
the tool is called popcon; And even tough it is opt in, in the last 12 months it had about 25K submissions.
Which is a large sample compared with other attempts to get telemetry.
Check the graphic at the end of the page
An example of data collected by popcon:
