Have a look at what a typical Android phone sends out! Including your GPS location! Apple isn’t immune either because the Facebook SDK that’s included with everything would make the NSA blush. TikTok even tracks your phone motion sensor.

IMHO raging about 30-year old diagnostic features is misplaced anger. Be angry about how every piece of software now goes through these stages:

1) Opt-out telemetry only collecting the important stuff, we promise!

2) Okay, collecting it synchronously was a mistake and it slowed down everything for everyone that’s not sitting in our head office. We fixed it though, don’t worry!

3) Umm.. apparently some people are behind corporate web proxies which makes the async code leak threads and melt CPUs. We fixed it though!

4) Some people have used the newly added proxy support to inspect the encrypted blob. We promise that it was an honest mistake collecting every single point of information we possibly could about your system including mouse movements and key presses. Don’t worry, we fixed it! We now “anonymise” the information. Don’t worry about why that’s in quotes.

5) Those socialist Europeans sued us when we said we deleted their data but it was still there when they reactivated their accounts. Oopsie! Our bad. We promise to “wipe” your data including telemetry when you request this form. Fill it out in triplicate and fax it to this Cayman Islands number please.

6) We can no longer sell our software in some jurisdictions. Don’t ask why or what that implies about how we treat our customers in other jurisdictions with weaker legal protections.