Paying how? People tick a box saying "If you tick this, we'll report how many cache misses your compilation passes did, and in return you'll get a gift card after 10k compilations"?

Why give away a gift card when they can use the data collected from your computer via the compiler to sell the opportunity to sell you a targeted gift card?

Not sure if serious, we are talking about data collection with zero chance of any practical targeted use.

The discussion would be a wholly different one if the data could be used for anything to e.g. sell, target ads or even deduce how/whether an individual has even used the application.

The data can obviously be used for things or google wouldn't pay for servers to collect it?

You sounded like you meant it could be used to target individuals, and not just draw statistical conclusions about the software. Those are quite different things. Every company that does "anonymous usage statistics" (which is basically the norm these days at least for larger apps) obviously have some use for the data or as you say they wouldn't be paying for the functionality.

I am serious that this will start as anonymous and sampled as stated but I am too cynical to think it will stay that way.

or 'tick this box or you're not allowed to access X, Y and Z parts of the tooling".

There's a big difference from functionality not existing to do this, and functionality existing that can change at any time. rsc's attitude about this comes with an air of "I want to alter the deal. Pray I don't alter it further"

> 'tick this box or you're not allowed to access X, Y and Z parts of the tooling'

That would be asshat-y but as long as no PII is transmitted, it would stop short of being a legal issue at least.

This is the thing though I think: people don't like to give up control (in this case, about what their software does). It's not about privacy, it's about control.

I'm sure that will not be gamed at all and that there is zero possibility for this to go wrong.