what is the reason to not allow a vendor to see which settings page you visit?
It's all about privacy; and by privacy, I don't mean the "privacy" that often gets thrown around by Big Tech to mean "only we can see what you do". What I do on my computer is none of their business.
Anonymous usage statistics means no one stores what _you_ do though. Obviously sending a url you visit or a file you open is way over the line. That’s about what you do. I think there is a difference between that and feature usage as counters only.
Yes if it can be deanonymized then it’s not anonymous. Almost a tautology that.
You can’t send the telemetry over http without revealing an ip, but obviously that ip can’t be stored as part of the telemetry data. That’s PII and not anonymous at all.
Important: if I collect anonymous telemetry you better trust me that it’s anonymous when I say it is. Because if you don’t trust me on that then you can’t run the software at all (if it’s a piece of software that relies on web requests in some form at least). Otherwise why would you even trust that my opt in is respected?
You have to trust software vendors of software that makes http requests. It’s as simple as that. You can use open source or try to inspect packets. Or firewall the software. But if it does (for example) one update check on startup which is common, then it’s almost impossible to tell whether it contains telemetry data. Because even the bare minimum request “this is FooApp 2.9.1 are there any updates” contains important usage stats: it’s +1 for the use counter and +1 for the v2.9 use counter!
It's all about privacy; and by privacy, I don't mean the "privacy" that often gets thrown around by Big Tech to mean "only we can see what you do". What I do on my computer is none of their business.