The imperative to fork generally stems from fundamental philosophical disagreements between the current maintainer and the user base. Concern over privacy seems pretty fundamental to me.

Badgering the maintainer doesn't fix the fundamental philosophical disagreement.

Forks don't matter if they don't succeed—it only wastes the time of people volunteering to have it wasted. But when they do succeed, sometimes amazing things happen. The history of open source is rife with hugely consequential forks.