You can definetly collect a lot of useful telemetry data without collecting any of the, lets say, “most sensitive” private information.
Just to exemplify:
you can collect telemetry on the most acessed features of a software and associate it with their location: whilst collecting their location you can definetly choose between having the person’s specific location (GPS coordinates with a few meters of accuracy) or their broad location (i.e.: their city, state, or country).
with the broad location you can have insights on how users of your software behave per region and plan accordinly actions or those regions.
Collecting someones specific location is definetly way more sensitive than their broad location…
And the full content of all textual documents a person generates has a very high chance of containing of their most sensitive private information…
Because I do not want Microsoft to have access to all my documents.
This
As if windows does not send telemetry
Don’t use Windows either.
Telemetry ≠ Uploading whole documents Which does not mean I defend Windows telemetry but it’s quite different
Comes from a person who hasn’t written telemetry. It’s either useless or contains private information
There are many tiers of private information.
You can definetly collect a lot of useful telemetry data without collecting any of the, lets say, “most sensitive” private information.
Just to exemplify:
you can collect telemetry on the most acessed features of a software and associate it with their location: whilst collecting their location you can definetly choose between having the person’s specific location (GPS coordinates with a few meters of accuracy) or their broad location (i.e.: their city, state, or country).
Collecting someones specific location is definetly way more sensitive than their broad location…
And the full content of all textual documents a person generates has a very high chance of containing of their most sensitive private information…
Private information doesn’t necessarily mean “entire contents of all word documents I have ever created”