Opt-in tracking, I really hope you mean. I know the concerns with getting unrepresentative samples but sending what I'm working on to a third party is something that would immediately stop me using an entire language for any form of my work.
It doesn't have to be strictly opt-in or opt-out. There could be two versions released, a version without tracking could live on the same release page, just a bit lower and not in a bold font or something like that, pushing new users towards the version with opt-out tracking.
This is a dark pattern. Why would you want the default to be a compiler that essentially spies on your code? I can think of no better way to make developers (not to mention businesses!) uncomfortable with the idea of adopting Rust.
Thankfully, Mozilla is one of the few entities left in the technology industry that seems to care about ethics. I don't believe the Rust team would ever do something like this.
No, it's not a dark pattern, you have a clear choice, just one being less advertised than the other one.
And Mozilla is the one with opt-out of all of the unethical features in Firefox. They have no ethics, looking like they care about those things is nothing more, but PR. After all, corporations are not people.
Is there a mailing list I can subscribe to that will tell me when I can turn this on? I'm hoping not to have to listen to rust-dev for the trigger phrase.
I don't know off the top of my head because it's been a while since we talked about it and I haven't paid super close attention to rustup's development. I am assuming that we would make an announcement on the blog because we'd want to be very clear about what's going on, and of course, try to convince people to opt in :)