There are essential, fire-extinguisher-like features. The canonical example is the joke about backup software: if it were developed according to today's standard of telemetry-driven engagement analytics, the restore from backup functionality would be removed because it's used so infrequently.
This actually happens sometimes: when developing the demo ".kkrieger", a first-person 3D shooter in 96 KiB, demogroup theprodukkt tried to shrink it down to get it under the 96 KiB wire. One of the tricks they used was using a profiler to identify code sections that were never reached and could be removed. One of the sections they removed was the handler for the up arrow key in the main menu, simply because the test player never pressed up in the menu.
If you think that Google or another large software organization won't misuse telemetry by cutting or neglecting important but infrequently used functionality to hit some KPI... have you ever worked in a large software organization?
All stats can be deanonymized. The more data you make available, the more you identify yourself. I do not need software I use stealthily tying up bandwidth by "phoning home" with data about me. It is simultaneously betrayal and resource theft. If I wanted to contribute to the improvement of the software, I'd file a bug report.
I think your view of the ways usage stats are used is a bit simplistic. Not everyone remove "underused" features without giving some consideration, even in big corporations.
But since you clearly don't like telemetry, you should have a way to reliably switch it off. Here we are on the same page: there must be a well-documented and easy way to switch any telemetry off.
If telemetry is on by default, the vendor obviously wants you to have telemetry on. They are incentivized to make switching it off as difficult as possible, and even pull tricks like turning it back on after a delay of 7 or 30 days or so.
Telemetry should be opt-in, if it's provided at all.
This actually happens sometimes: when developing the demo ".kkrieger", a first-person 3D shooter in 96 KiB, demogroup theprodukkt tried to shrink it down to get it under the 96 KiB wire. One of the tricks they used was using a profiler to identify code sections that were never reached and could be removed. One of the sections they removed was the handler for the up arrow key in the main menu, simply because the test player never pressed up in the menu.
If you think that Google or another large software organization won't misuse telemetry by cutting or neglecting important but infrequently used functionality to hit some KPI... have you ever worked in a large software organization?
All stats can be deanonymized. The more data you make available, the more you identify yourself. I do not need software I use stealthily tying up bandwidth by "phoning home" with data about me. It is simultaneously betrayal and resource theft. If I wanted to contribute to the improvement of the software, I'd file a bug report.