Medical research and consent doesn't work like this. If you track your patients without their consent, or you share their data without their explicit consent, you'll land in very hot water, which will cook you even before you can scream.

Similarly, a medical trial will take a very detailed consent before you can start.

Your opt-out telemetry is akin to your insurance sending you powered and Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes out of the blue to track you and threaten to cancel your insurance if you don't use that toothbrush and send data to them.

Or as a more extreme example, going through an important procedure not with the known and proven method but with an experimental one, because you didn't opt-out and nobody bothered to tell you this. In reality, you need to sign consent and waiver forms to accept experimental methods.

> "Medical research and consent doesn't work like this."

Yes, I agree that person's comparison to non-consensual medical research is stupid.

> "Your opt-out telemetry is akin to your insurance sending you powered and Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes out of the blue to track you and threaten to cancel your insurance if you don't use that toothbrush and send data to them."

More akin to your insurance company making a public RFC where you can discuss the coming telemetry, then you choosing to ask your insurance for an optional toothbrush, being able to opt out of telemetry if you want to, the insurance company documenting how to opt out[1], you being able to edit the toothbrush source code to remove the telemetry entirely with the insurance company's approval because it's MIT licensed, and absolutely nothing happening to you if you opt out.