I always suspected that there was probably significant overlap between users of macros and users who opted out of telemetry. Lesson learned: leaving "yes" checked from now on.

Big Brother has trained you well. ;-)

Yep. Don't vote and nobody will care about your (unexpressed) needs when making decisions.

Well, it would be nice if there is a way to vote or express one's needs via some alternative to having one's usage actively mined for data.

I think you are truly in a minority if you'd rather take a survey than have the data collected automatically. There has to be a sane middle ground.

Data collected by a neutral third party without conflicting interests pushing for creative monetization opportunities that's responsible for sufficient annonymisation/aggregation before releasing the data?

There is mining for data and there is mining for data.

Monitoring which features I use? Opt in.

Monitoring what I do? Uninstall if possible.

You can always refrain to use their technology. There is plenty green grass in the neighboring fields.

I only remember accidentally t turning them on and they getting mad!

Are you referring to the 1% on wall street? ;)