My point is that it's done this way for a reason beyond the nefarious ones that people in hn always seem to assume. Engineers want this data because it helps them do their job, bit because some product person wants to use it to sell it or use it to train an ML model. There is certainly extraneous data collected because the incremental cost of doing so once you've established the pipeline is small and eventually someone does make a bad decision, but that's where we should focus our energy. Otherwise you're just making a lot of folks jobs harder because their software runs doesn't run in the cloud. An unintended consequence of this might be to push even more software into the cloud which would otherwise run on client side.