[darkwater]

Then you can either: 1) don't use the software 2) analyze the software source code to understand what it does before using it

I tend and prefer to assume good-will WRT telemetry in well-known and independent opensource projects.

[vetinari]

You forgot 3) Complain at different intensities, up to the shaming, about the unethical dark patterns employed by the software, no matter whether it is open source or not, to make authors of the software aware, that what they do is not welcome by their users.

[predmijat]

Disagree, it should be the norm.

[glenngillen]

I use Little Snitch to alert on any outbound connections and make a decision. The google stuff immediately got a permanent blackhole for Homebrew. Anything I'm uncertain of I'll give a short-term approval (30mins) to not break anything. After a couple of rounds of execution (and sometimes some trial & error) you can usually work out which requests are essential and which are some notifications/tracking thing.

[daneel_w]

So you didn't see the notice brew(1) gives you on first run?

[glenngillen]

I can't recall, though this approach isn't specific to homebrew. I block it permanently at a network/process level rather than having to remember to set a ENV var.