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What's the difference here? There's a unique client ID included in the report, so that means statistics can be tracked at the individual level.

In theory you can have telemetry without tracking but I'm pretty sure nobody does it anymore.




Telemetry analysis doesn’t care who you are, and makes no effort to find out, even if it’s plausible that one could find out of effort was taken to do so.

Tracking analysis does care who you are, and makes every effort to find out, whether to sell marketing to you or to sell your data to others.

It isn’t necessary to deanonymize telemetry to make use of it, and it’s quite costly to do so (both in PII storage duties to GDPR et al. and in enrichment terms), so tracking isn’t knowingly done by default by lots of telemetry implementers (for example, Homebrew).

Note that telemetry implemented using Facebook clearly does end up with Facebook trying to track you in order to sell you ads and sell your data; implementation decisions are critically relevant when it comes to collecting telemetry, in order to not accidentally cause tracking.




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