I fully understand your thinking as a user. Sure. I don’t want to get tracked, noone should know that I already have installed Manjaro. Hence you’re in the forums and post about Manjaro, even shared some “personal” info here in this forum with others @ghoultek. From a developer perspective you may need that data to go into meetings with potential supporters like companies to get funding. Those will always ask how often is your software used and who is using it.
Sure, topic Telemetry got extreme abused by Microsoft and other companies. They ask for money from the user, collect their data, may share that with partners and even present you Ads, which may or may not break your system. If we look at the Apple at some point it may even make sense to share some data with them. Services like track my Iphone and others depending on data collection and if you don’t use it and loose such an expensive phone it comes in handy. But ya, it may come with a bad taste after all.
So we know your story about Telemetry but that doesn’t speak for all users. Some don’t even register to this forum and we really don’t know how many users there are. We can guess with forum users, download stats or even stats of our homepages, however an exact count of our user base we don’t have.
Therefore we try to find a solution without the need of any personal data and opt-in option to extend the data shared, to help the project to focus more on the needs of the larger user base. We already managed the base functionality to count installations in a way to see if the user only tried it for some weeks, has it installed months ago or even kept it for years. Then we may collect the used desktop environment, kernel version and basic technical info about the system. The server component will serve the collected data and makes it public to all. This prevents any data selling as it is public goods anyway.
With this we will offer a platform for distros, software developers and all kind of projects having an ethical framework to collect needed data in such a way that the personal data of a user is always protected. And if that is not wanted at all, the client software can be uninstalled completely.