This may be by design, as it punishes those who dare to value their privacy.

eg, some options:

a) No telemetry. All users of the Go language get equal treatment/consideration by the developers ("best guess").

b) With telemetry. The users who opt out are thereby excluded from consideration ("punished").

It seems like over time, option b) would lead to problems for the Go language as the developers base their decisions on incomplete information, whilst believing that information is somehow more complete than option a).

I'm not entirely sure how biased the data would be; there needs to be a correlation between "frobs with telemetry" (whether it's opt-in or opt-out doesn't even matter) and any other metric. I'm not so sure there is one, although perhaps there could be – we need telemetry to demonstrate that :-)

Questions about bias in reported data are legitimate and a genuine topic of concern, but this:

> This may be by design, as it punishes those who dare to value their privacy.

Is just veering off in the conspiratorial.

> Is just veering off in the conspiratorial.

While you may be right, the problem is an obvious one but doesn't seem to be considered.

On the "conspiratorial" front, punishing people who value their privacy seems like it'd be strategically useful to Google, an ad company who has demonstrated their leaders to sometimes be intelligent but ethically challenged people. ;)