telemetry helps. you still get to turn it off

Folks' attitude towards telemetry has always bothered me. When I was actively working on pump.io I wished all the time for telemetry. My biggest problem was figuring out which Node.js versions I needed to support, given what Linux distributions node admins were running. This had real maintenance costs, the most blatant example being that I had to maintain two anti-XSS paths, the better of which was only supported on newer Node versions. Dropping old Nodes meant deleting quite a lot of security(!) code.

I often disable telemetry for stuff because I'm suspicious and/or don't want to support the product, but I am happy to keep it on for software like Firefox that takes telemetry privacy seriously, and is at least less objectionable than all the other big players.

Telemetry is a convenience for developers at the cost of the privacy and autonomy of users.

Developers will spin a wide variety of stories about how useful telemetry is to them and how, presumably, making their own lives easier will trickle down into benefits for users. They will always claim that they are only taking what they need. The most useful telemetry is the most maximal; the most invasive and bandwidth-consuming. Once there's a little bit, it's always easy to keep pushing the envelope, gathering more and more fine-grained information and phoning home about it.

They will also claim that telemetry must be opt-out, because too few users would choose to opt-in, with informed, affirmative consent. That tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it?