My personal take is that this type of telemetry is fine. I just don't want to give potentially unbounded, hard-to-audit access to my telemetry data over to the likes of Google. If your application provides a means of learning _what_ is getting sent, and you make it opt-in, and you only send it to infrastructure you completely control (within reason, I'm not going to complain if it's a VPS or something), then there shouldn't really be any controversy.

I don't hate Google. I just don't want my desktop applications to even be capable of telling Google about my computer usage if I can at all help it.