This is a valid forward-looking concern that I think needs to be much more clearly addressed. It's one thing to have default-enabled telemetry in the toolchain itself, but once that window is open it's going to be much more difficult to close it and stem the tide of telemetry features creeping in further elsewhere in the Golang ecosystem where they'd be much more of a privacy concern.
Without a strong commitment from the Golang maintainers that this is where it would stop (have they communicated anything to that effect?), we have no reason to believe it will stop here, and all the more reason to be concerned that this is just the beginning and it will be pushed much further in the future.
From the issue on GitHub, Russ believes it would be "clearly inappropriate" to push telemetry into user code, so yes, they have communicated their opinion on this
> To be clear, I am only suggesting that the instrumentation be added to the Go command-line tools written and distributed by the Go team, such as the go command, the Go compiler, gopls, and govulncheck. I am not suggesting that instrumentation be added by the Go compiler to all Go programs in the world: that’s clearly inappropriate.
> Russ believes it would be "clearly inappropriate" to push telemetry into user code, so yes, they have communicated their opinion on this
Erm, not quite....
Somebody explicitly asked (on one of the moderator hidden posts, I might add) "@rsc Can you guarantee that this will always be the case?"[1]
The answer was wishy-washy to put it politely:
"I can't guarantee we'll all still be here tomorrow. But for as long as Go exists and is developed, I expect that interested open source contributors like yourselves will notice and flag changes that move backward. That seems to me a more useful check on the future evolution of Go than anything I promise."
Saying "you'll have to notice and flag it" is not exactly reassuring. Especially given the way the Go team have been reacting to the "flagging" on the telemetry discussion itself !!
That's pretty common. It's what you say to your kid when they want to go to the amusement park this weekend, but you don't want to disappoint them right that second so you say something to push it off until you figure it out.
Yet ....
It could easily be only a matter of time before we see feature creep and another "proposal", this time to insert it into the binaries.