> This is the only industry where we've normalised this kind of liberty taking.

Or the only one where you're personally aware of it. The kind of low-frequency limited data the Go team proposed collecting is basically the same as, say, McDonald's telling store managers to report how many people ordered mayonnaise on their sandwiches so they can decide whether to continue stocking it. It's worlds better than the kind of individual patron tracking large retailers or credit card companies routinely do, but they don't advertise that.

There are two differences here: one is where data collection happens — since this is running locally rather than in the cloud we know it's happening — and the other is the larger question of Google's corporate reputation is affecting reactions. A lot of the takes on social media have been reacting to that larger issue, many by people who don't even use Go, and are alleging scenarios far beyond what would be possible with the proposed system. I think some of this also goes back to the risk of being open: I would bet that more than a few of the people who are very concerned about Go lang use tools like VSCode which collect far more data but not having the big public proposal didn't mean everyone was talking about it at the same time.

Ay but come on, likening it to stock keeping is a bit disingenious. A company's perfectly entitled to keep track of their stock, and they don't need anything from me to do it.

The credit card companies are more like it but I opt out of that game too, by not using them. Their practices are well known to me.

Yeah, that’s kind of what I was trying to get at in the second paragraph about the difference in where data is collected. In our hypothetical restaurant example, I think most people’s reactions would depend heavily on what specifically is collected and the granularity: almost nobody cares about someone saying they track what sells best, and only few would even care about their specific combination of items being tallied, but more people care if it can be linked to them in a loyalty program, and still more would care if it was something like an app tracking your attention on the menu. As described, I think the proposed system is more like the second of those four examples but a fair fraction of people are talking like it’s the fourth.

To be clear, “what if they extended the scope later?” is a fair question but I do think that needs to be carefully expressed as a significant hypothetical future change from the actual proposal.