Hard to believe, but they used to sell products a while ago and had no telemetry.
If you want to see how it's done properly, look at OmniGroup: their apps have toggleable telemetry and it's off by default.
There is difference between collecting information about how many people are using vs whether a particular person is using.
Collecting diagnostic information from windows application failures/how many failures etc are there ever since Windows 95 era.
Similarly, collecting information about how many people are using dotnet core build/test/publish is similar to how Google/Mozilla tracks how many users are running which version of their product and experience issues.
If Microsoft/Google/Mozilla or any other company uses that information to identify a specific person is "effectively spying on you". Until that's not there, the same functionality exists in almost every product. Just click bait article.
Doesn't have to be malicious, doesn't have to be what's legally defined as personal information. The fact that many companies are doing it doesn't make it less inappropriate.
Reputable companies will clearly inform users and ask for their confirmation. Then they respect their choice.
Disreputable companies such as MS or Google take without asking, use dark patterns to trick users, default to always on, reset privacy settings, etc.
I think I'll be happy the day EU and American consumer protection agencies start looking closer into Googles business.
I'd also applaud even more visible information about what exactly gets collected and sent (the old gds "Read very carefully - this is not the usual yadda yadda" would be a good start).
However IMO we shouldn't call legitimate telemetry "spyware". I thing that is what you call "crying wolf".
If you say no, it won't send anything.
No, the settings do not mysteriously reset themselves.
"Someone submitted a PR to Mozilla to fix this, and the Mozilla devs closed it"
Yeah well you and the author's first clue should have been when you stopped paying for said products.
And in this specific case, it's really not spying, it reveals pretty much nothing about you and help them figure out what is used and what fails.
Or are you making some weird accusations against the FSF and the GNU Project?
https://news.microsoft.com/2017/07/19/dun-bradstreet-teams-u...
Again I am making a huge assumption about correctly selected telemetry data here but opt in mechanisms won't get even 10% of the data they currently do.