I'd be interested to hear a plausible explanation for how this could negatively affect users in any way.

It's not the user's responsibility to justify why thy don't want you eavesdropping on their property. Even if you manufactured the device, its not your property after you sold it.

It's your responsibility as the manufacturer to ask for permission if you want to observe someone's private property in any way.

> demonstrably toxic minority.

Standing up for property rights is toxic? Just because software made it easy to observe and/or control a device after the 1st sale doesn't give you the right to eavesdrop on other people's property (or vandalize it with an unwanted, forced update).

It breaks trust.

The phoning home isn't the issue - it's the lack of communicating it and lack of offering an ability to turn it off that is the problem. A vocal minority may grab pitchforks if it's opt-out rather than opt-in but most would be fine with it.... Ubiquiti did it one worse and didn't even offer opt-out.

Instead you have your network device provider saying - well if you don't want our devices to call home use another device in front of us to block it.

So the core issue is trust and basic respect for your clearly technical and security minded customers.

Well, for one it crashed your device periodically if your network was not set up to allow that connection.

That's more than plausible, it already happened.

They fixed that, but now, what's in the telemetry they're sending? Any bugs causing it to send PII in any circumstance?