The core thing to understand here is that what constitutes their concerns is not your decision. It's theirs.
You don't know what they put in their code. Maybe they did put their bank account in a function name. The tool won't tell them they shouldn't have done that, and there's currently no reason why they shouldn't if they're just playing around.
Similarly, you don't know what they're doing or how doing that might expose them in ways they might care about. If my country decides to outlaw something and starts looking for mentions of it and jailing people, your decision yesterday could endanger me. This happens with some regularity, and you can't reliably predict the topics that get targeted.
I generally approve telemetry for tools because I know how useful it is. But I see no reason why that should be your choice instead of mine.
Thank you for proving my point - again, no rational debate here. Obviously nobody would ever make a function name their bank account number. And why would metrics include function names? Metrics are numbers, not logs.
> Similarly, you don't know what they're doing or how doing that might expose them in ways they might care about. If my country decides to outlaw something and starts looking for mentions of it and jailing people, your decision yesterday could endanger me. This happens with some regularity, and you can't reliably predict the topics that get targeted.
Yet another contrived example that has nothing to do with the subject at hand and has no rational basis for happening. A random country creates a random law that happens to outlaw a compiler metric? You think a country's gonna make software development illegal soon?
> I generally approve telemetry for tools because I know how useful it is. But I see no reason why that should be your choice instead of mine.
Nobody's taking away your choices! You don't want telemetry? Block the outgoing connections! Disable it in a config file! Use a friggin' VPN like all the other privacy-paranoid do!
And the example is really not contrived. For example, homosexuality has waffled between "get married, love is love" and "your government is explicitly trying to kill you" repeatedly around the world. Congratulations! You worked on Grindr two years ago when they started their internet dragnet, as they can see by information coming from your compiler, on your machine, at your home! You now have to flee the country. They're not going to be looking for your compiler crash logs, they're looking at everything they can possibly collect for keywords, and oopsie, there's one.
You (you personally and the "royal" you) cannot predict what will matter in the future, and your legitimate-threats do not match everyone else's legitimate-threats. I agree privacy-extremists exist, but so do other kinds of extremists and extreme situations.
Telemetry is not sensitive data. Telemetry is "signals". For desktop software, telemetry is often what operating system, cpu architecture, and software version you're running. Your OS reports that, your browser reports that, every self-updating application you use reports that. This is not controversial nor sensitive data and has no privacy implication.
Collection of any data about me, my machines, or my use of my machines without my informed consent is spying. How sensitive the data actually is is beside the point.
In any case, so much good will has been burned now that it's not unreasonable to be very sensitive about any data collection whatsoever. People being reluctant to share isn't a case of people being unreasonable, it's an understandable response to so many years of abuse and violation of trust.
Most HN people are anti-telemetry and tracking. I've never actually seen these privacy concerns being fleshed out with specific details of how logs could be abused but it really doesn't matter if a real mechanism for abuse exists. What matters is people fear that it may exist and stop using the tool as a result.
I suggest taking a look at the thread suggesting telemetry in the Go toolchain (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707583). You can judge for yourself if there's legitimate concerns being surfaced, but there's no doubt that there's significant opposition to such the proposal.
Rust is getting ahead of this discussion by making it clear that their log collection won't phone home and it won't be automated.
At this point I consider any advocate of "privacy" in a tech context to be an anti-intellectual cargo-cultist. Just look at the linked article. Absolutely not one single example of a privacy violation or its implications. They just waive their hands in the air and say "it's contentious" and "risk is too great". Let's completely avoid an actual discussion of privacy, and just assume that any information about a user (like their IP address) will immediately result in them being sent to a gulag, despite no evidence that this has ever happened, much less how often, how likely, ways to avoid it, or the benefits that are lost by not allowing for said insanely-unlikely-risk. It's people afraid of their own shadow that would rather live in a prepper shelter than deal with the real world.
Of course we should completely ignore the fact that this is developer software, and they, being technical people, have many means to disable specific outgoing network connections if they so choose. But better to be paranoid than rational, because "trust is key".