However, speaking from experience, relying on user feedback alone to drive development is doomed to failure.
People lie about what features they use, or will use - perhaps not maliciously, but they do.
Also, it simply doesn't scale - apart from sampling bias (think about the sort of people who would provide feedback), if you have millions of users (and many of these webapps/mobile apps do), you need to use things like automated bug reports, and telemetry data to get your stats.
There are sites that I do not frequent, simply because the ads are annoying, or I don't agree with that service's TOS - I simply don't use those services.
The examples you cited (Lenovo and Sony) are certainly ones I wouldn't use (although to be honest, I probably wouldn't have used them even before either - I'm still upset at Sony for the whole MiniDisc fiasco, and their sad obsession with proprietary vendor/lock-in standards).
If you don't want to use those services - then don't.
But the author complaining about Amazon Underground, when the whole point of it is that it collects app usage data (to compensate application developers) seems a big disingenuous.
If there is some wider issue around telemetry data and privacy implications, I'm certainly keen to hear it.
Production telemetry is a godsend for developers to debug their crappy apps (I'd wish there were no buggy, crappy apps in the first place, but...) but I think there's an acceptable way and a questionable way of getting it. The acceptable way is simply requiring user action. Many programs let you email or just 'report' logs and other info if you or the program think there's a problem you want someone to look into. Some make it easy to see what the data actually consists of which can help you tell if they put effort trying to know as little as necessary, avoiding things not their business. There's also an expectation that the data will be used once for helping you and that's all. The questionable way of getting the data is to just hoover up whatever behind the scenes.
The interesting cases (which apply to other data too) are in between. On one hand it's acceptable for LinkedIn to ask for your email password so they can get a list of people you might know and want to connect with, but you have little assurance they don't (or won't in the future) questionably hoover up all your email contents for vague reason x, no reason yet/just in case, or inadvertently for really unfortunate reason y when they get compromised, and that's enough for at least a creepy feeling if not fear in some cases.
It'd be nice if you [the business] would remember that if I'm using you, you're good enough as-is, and while you may be able to infer some of my pain points that I'm not even aware of, you could just ask me, but realize the act of asking is going to be seen against you because I assume by default my feedback will go ignored or at best be put on some team's P3 backlog/bucket list to never actually get done. I just have no trust in feedback being considered important and acted upon unless I'm in contact with someone with a name and the power to do anything.
So we can play cat-and-mouse (I use noscript and ublock on my gentoo box, I find that mostly sufficient), I can feed you bad data, or hey maybe I just accept the state of the world and use chrome beta on my unrooted Samsung phone and buy from amazon and install and use other crap apps because while it's none of your business what my GPS coordinates are pretty much unless you're map related, your main business is still awfully convenient, and this pocket computer is awfully convenient even if it can and should be so much more than the default software ecosystem lets it be. Also because I default to giving you a benefit of the doubt, if not really trusting you, on most things until you betray that placed by me or others (Sony, Lenovo have done so in my book). And at last yeah there's not much that scares me personally about you having most of the data you could have that's not your business. Some examples that might concern others, though, just on unnecessary GPS data: perhaps you have a rogue employee who has made this anonymized data less so for personal reasons (like knowing when I'm away from home to rob me), or perhaps you show me an ad for a business I've walked/driven by but never entered and while such an ad may locally be a net gain for all parties involved it's nevertheless seen as one more brick in the concerning ongoing perverse transformation of the world into a temple for Mammon.
[Ed: note this rant is mostly about other data like GPS, but usage any more sophisticated than things like installed, uninstalled, used for x time, no longer used, can pretty quickly get into the territory of "you, game company, have no business knowing I'm playing your game at 2am on a weeknight [in my house?] and thus can arrange an ad for sleeping pills." I love the concept of Underground, knew about the usage tracking on day one, and have several apps.]