| > Anything that does not require an explicit user action to enable telemetry imo falls short of the desired ethical standard of respect for user agency that should exist in an ecosystem that wishes to foster trust between vendors and users Personally, I disagree. I think that telemetry should be clearly disclosed (as any kind of 'phone home' functionality), so as to give user full knowledge of what will run on their machine. In this sense something negative about telemetry is that it is not uncommon to find it turned on by default after an update (I have no idea whether this applies to Microsoft), or when in situation like the recent gitlab blunder they decided to have third-party scripts for telemetry. For anything else active-by-default telemetry is in the same category as adding half a dozen random dot-files in your home directory (which often is not configurable). > ... this goes double for open-source projects. Again I disagree, with free-software you have the right to run a telemetry free version of the product and with open-source you have the ability to actually inspect what the telemetry is doing. The place where telemetry is sort of shady is the gray area that is neither free/open software not enterprise agreements with legally binding reasonable contracts; which includes for example Windows 10. |
The free software vs. open-source distinction is quite subjective but irrelevant here - Powershell source code is released under the MIT license which allows anyone to produce a modified telemetry-free build but sensibly does not obligate the authors to provide one themselves, hence my original comment.