It's really very sad, because users have no idea what is going on and there is no incentive for bad programs to improve (actually, there is generally incentive in the opposite direction, because it's work to write well-behaving apps). Users just know that they need to keep buying new computers and that their battery life is worse, but they can't figure out why so they point fingers at everyone but who they should actually be blaming.

Remember when shitty user-hostile spying wasn't a library you included that assured you in its readme it was "made with [heart] in California"? Ah, the days when only criminals and bigcos casually engaged in shady crap.

That's a somewhat unrelated discussion, but yes, I am not very happy with the current state of software where people think they are entitled to out-out analytics information coming off my machine.

Well, I remember the days when a message in Windows cropped up saying (standard at the time when a program crashed): "Do you want to send the error report to Microsoft" and my boss called me, asking a bit concrened, "Please, tell me honestly, what do you think - should we send them this error report?"