[maccard]

I think this example is a great example of a benefit of telemetry. If your telemetry tells you that a _very large number of people_ are using it, and you have complaints from a number of people who have _never used it_ (or disabled telemetry), that tells you there's value in what you're doing.

Some people will never be happy, e.g.

> We live in the age where open source package managers and build tools come with built-in, opt-out invasive telemetry, and I'm talking bona fide OSS, not something by Microsoft. It's reasonable to assume that the plugin is, or at some point will be, phoning home, until proven otherwise.

That's a false equivalence to OP's point - there's a _stark_ different between telemetry and phoning home with training data.

[TeMPOraL]

> If your telemetry tells you that a _very large number of people_ are using it, and you have complaints from a number of people who have _never used it_ (or disabled telemetry), that tells you there's value in what you're doing.

This is how you lose thousand seats enterprise licensing deals without even realizing it.

> That's a false equivalence to OP's point - there's a _stark_ different between telemetry and phoning home with training data.

Yeah, arguably the former is worse. In the latter case, the data is actually relevant to the product and there's a chance of the user directly benefiting from it.