Apple, which collects a lot of telemetry, made privacy a tenet of their brand, and they've successfully conflated the two in the mind of a layperson.
Separately, most telemetry would tell stories like, "This project is a failure." Little incentive for people to adopt it. Then again, most OSS is ordered by the mania of its programmer-creators, not product or engineering quality informed by telemetry. Maybe in a Darwinian way, we only have the OSS that can thrive without telemetry and reactive product and engineering decisions.
Debian, RedHat and Firefox do have telemetry. Not a lot, but enough to prove it is possible to do it in a way that doesn't piss most people off.
Naturally the way they collect it is open source, it's largely de-identified, and because it open source you verify it's de-identified enough for you. And if it isn't you can turn it off.
So it's possible to do well, where "well" means gets you the data you without pissing off the users. Most proprietary don't bother to do it well for whatever reason.
But they should be careful: it a big factor in diving things like Home Assistant, Linux Desktop and now this, apparently.
Separately, most telemetry would tell stories like, "This project is a failure." Little incentive for people to adopt it. Then again, most OSS is ordered by the mania of its programmer-creators, not product or engineering quality informed by telemetry. Maybe in a Darwinian way, we only have the OSS that can thrive without telemetry and reactive product and engineering decisions.