[mlry]

How about calling it evil and nefarious to speak about voluntary statistics when it is not opt-in, but opt-out? There are users out there who will agree to anything. But I doubt those are the ones that really should direct the evolution of a piece of software. And almost no users will agree to telemetry when openly asked what we are talking about. And I have yet to be convinced that telemetry is actually as useful as proclaimed. I don't really see Firefox moving in a direction that enhances user experience based on gathered data. Windows, anyone?

[LWinterberg]

In the context of Audacity, telemetry already would have been useful: A previous version removed the cut/copy/paste buttons, thinking that people normally used ctrl+x/c/v. However, in practice this turned out to only be half-true: while cutting in the context of cut-and-paste may have been used with shortcuts, a fairly significant number of Audacity users actually used "the scissors" to cut (as in: delete) content and came to the forum to complain because their core workflow was broken.

This sort of situation is bad for everyone: People get their workflow broken, devs need to do work to remove and later reinstate a feature, and privacy-minded people who want to complain need to share name and email to sign up on a forum for an account. In addition, it is hard to gauge what significance the forum posts have: If 100 people are complaining, are they a vocal minority of the millions of users Audacity has, or are they representative of most people?

This is especially true considering Audacity is the sort of casual "useful toolbox USB stick" program for many people - they're not going to closely follow development and updates or participate in polls or surveys, simply because it's not a part of their life they care about that much. This situation is different for something like Blender in which the tool tends to be a major part of your hobby or job if you use it at all. Although, saying that: This is a hypothesis based on my perception which cannot be verified as neither Blender nor Audacity track this data.

With telemetry (which for Audacity would have been a "do you want telemetry yes/no"-type dialog on first launch) the question "does anyone actually use the cut/copy/paste buttons?" would have been answered with "actually, yes", things would have been done differently, nobody's workflows would have been broken, and privacy-minded folks would not have needed to put emails on a forum which may or may not get hacked in the future.

In some sense, even people who disable telemetry benefit from telemetry being an option - assuming that their needs are in aggregate otherwise similar to the average user.