Yup - I understand that; I looked at the code. But, and I think I expressed this poorly, I have no assurances except through forensics (i.e., having to go grovel through a bunch of code for a few frigging sidebar functions that have no reason to be sending anything anywhere in the first place!), that that's all they did. The breach of trust has been created and it has created a relationship (an unwitting one) that they could change at will.
Yeah, after thinking it over, I agree. It also wasn't clear to me that they were trying to hide the fact that they were submitting the statistics to Kite. I thought they were being up front about it. Your reaction (and everyone else's) makes complete sense in that context. It was strange that a list of file extensions caused such uproar, but it's doubly strange that they tried to be shady about collecting it.
I guess it's best to enforce a blanket ban on this behavior. I still can't get over how dumb it was for Kite to do this. All they had to do was be open and honest about it and nobody would've cared too much. Crossing over into the realm of paid spyware is way too far.