[md8z]

What is missing here is that no other method to collect feedback and product analytics has been proposed. It is impossible to make decisions at a company the size of Microsoft without that type of information. All the larger companies are doing it for this reason. Opt-out telemetry is the easiest and cheapest way to get it. Most Linux desktops don't have to deal with the problem because they aren't that big, and the operating systems that didn't have it at all were built for a different era. You're framing this as something being about the will of the users or being "user-hostile" vs not, but that's honestly not important here, this is a very real technical problem. Overwhelmingly it seems that Windows users (and some Linux users, definitely Android users if you count those as "Linux") are fine with the current state of things.

In some places it seems that people did care, for example the GDPR is a step in the right direction, but there seems to be about zero political will to do anything like that in the United States. And even that doesn't really change the state of telemetry in Windows that much.