There is no good purpose for telemetry, it is needed only for malicious purposes
What a myopic, hysterical, uninformed, and untrue claim.
There are definitely some uses for telemetry that are absolutely beneficial to the user: crash reports and usability research. Developers use crash reports to figure out what the most common application crashes are, so they can fix them.
Stable software benefits the user.
Some developers use telemetry to figure out how people use their software: which features actually get used the most? How do people access them (toolbars? Menus? Keyboard shortcuts? Right-click menus?) Which commands get used in what combinations? For example, knowing which commands are often followed by “undo” tells you it’s an error-prone feature. Microsoft’s use of usability telemetry has directly resulted in lots of usability improvements, for example the handy little menu that appears after pasting to let you format the pasted data. Knowing which features are used and how can help guide what features get prioritized for development.
Usability benefits the user.
Your reasoning is detached from the outcome.
Yes crash reports and usability reports are good data sources.
Do they benefit the user? That depends on the sausage factory in the middle of the process.
I have never seen an outcome that is user beneficial from a usability study. I posit that they are run by people who have no idea what they are doing.
As for the other point, my day job for the last couple of years has been running the reliability engineering team for a very large fintech. If you think that a crash dump results in a viable outcome for end users even 5% of the time then you are naive. Most of the time it is just noise. We get thousands of them an hour. And that is considered normal. Even if we do perform a causal analysis on a statistically common one, finding an engineer who can actually understand or solve the problem in a complex distributed system is an uphill battle as well.
The general theme in the thread above is there aren't a lot of people who know what they are doing. They are all making appropriate looking dances though and people who don't know what they are doing look at those and think they might know what they are doing. It's not turtles, but incompetence from the top to the bottom.
And that's why we shouldn't trust, not because the idea is bad, but the competence is bad.