While the motivation is dead on, I don't know about this . I feel like we would experience the same outrage (or at least similar) that we were subjected to during the great trusted storage debacle of version 13.
In addition to agreeing with jimlangrunner's response to this, you need to keep in mind the motivations and conditions behind "trusted storage" in v13, compared to that of this new proposal. The former was implemented for *your* benefit, and was a mandatory requirement of installation. This usage gathering would primarily benefit the users that decide to enable the tracking, with only a secondary benefit to SE corporate of maintaining its customer satisfaction and potential growth.
I acknowledge that there are plenty of users out there who would not believe that rhetoric, and they will assume some ulterior motive for data gathering. Those users will not enable the feature, so it's hard to see why they would feel damaged by it. (Thus, I strongly agree with those who suggest keeping the feature off by default).
OTOH, the biggest risk on the downside would be having the product identified as "spyware" by some automated detection program. Even if users have to enable the tracking manually, they may not fully understand all the ramifications and still get freaked out when their paranoia protection program cries "foul". This is particularly the case if the spyware detection is installed sometime later on, when the user may have forgotten about the SE tracking and its intention. I'd love to think that programmers who use SE would be in a class above such misunderstanding, but it only takes one person, and the damage caused by some public outcry like "SlickEdit now includes spyware" could be considerable.
The harder it is to enable the feature (like a downloadable macro), the less likely it might be to get misinterpreted. But it also might skew the results further away from the general consensus since now a smaller fraction of the user base will contribute to the data. For the data to be valid for its intended purpose, it should represent a fair sampling of everyone who uses SE, and the proportions might be skewed significantly as the circle of participation grows smaller. (It's better to not know, than to know incorrectly). (Edit: looks like Ryan is already on top of this concern in a message that came in while I was writing this. But I'll leave the thought here for completeness).
On rereading this post, it's pretty clear that I've both advocated as well as warned against implementing such a feature. That wasn't my initial intention, but in a roundabout way perhaps I supported Ryan's concern about the idea having a potential for backfiring.
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John