I find it outrageous; "Telemetry" is built into most new Microsoft software. For example, they recently released a replacement for powershell and CMD, called "Terminal 1.0", which also comes with some aggressive telemetry built in:
This also applies to newer releases of powershell, aka PS Core. I haven't tried either, but I guarantee you telemetry in both applications is not opt-in but opt out using some obscure method, if that is even possible.
In any case, the claim that telemetry is necessary to improve anything related to customer experience is ridiculous. Not only is a general data collection unnecessary; it would be more efficient to run some experiments, and be it some opt in A/B tests. Surveillance like the above is encroaching and can easily be abused. The data collected are usually fine-grained enough to allow for some nice fingerprinting of individual users. The potential for abuse is high.
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/host/t...
This also applies to newer releases of powershell, aka PS Core. I haven't tried either, but I guarantee you telemetry in both applications is not opt-in but opt out using some obscure method, if that is even possible.
In any case, the claim that telemetry is necessary to improve anything related to customer experience is ridiculous. Not only is a general data collection unnecessary; it would be more efficient to run some experiments, and be it some opt in A/B tests. Surveillance like the above is encroaching and can easily be abused. The data collected are usually fine-grained enough to allow for some nice fingerprinting of individual users. The potential for abuse is high.