[PacifyFish]

Maybe I've missed the boat, but what's the big deal about collecting telemetry?

You already trust Gitlab with everything you store in Gitlab, like source code, which is presumably much more sensitive than the number of times you loaded a page or clicked on a button or whatever.

Is it because the data would be stored with a third party, and you don't trust that third party? If Gitlab trusts the third party, and they're giving you the option to NOT trust the third party and only trust Gitlab, what's the issue?

[sleepytimetea]

"in Gitlab" has 2 meanings - Gitlab cloud and Gitlab on-premises. For customers running off-the-grid or in countries with enhanced privacy (GPDR?) laws and restrictions on where their data lives, this is not what they signed up for. Nor was the timeline forced on them reasonable in any way. Imagine your Oracle software TOS says we will now export anonymized data from your SQL queries to somewhere out there in the cloud ? What if it was a HIPAA-compliant hospital datacenter ?

We wouldn't want first-party telemetry either, we don't want _any_ data leaving our datacenter, period.