Morton Rand-Hendriksen documents his proposal for shipping an opt-in Telemetry feature that collects anonymized data, which would result in better understanding WordPress users. Better understanding users would of course allow core contributors to add, remove, or alter WordPress features to better serve them based on that data.
I agree that we should use data to inform WordPress core decision making. Joe and I talked about it during the live version of the Draft podcast at Publish. However, I stated in that podcast that I don’t actually think core needs to collect this data, because there are several hosts with aligned interests to the core team that already have it, or if they don’t, they can get it. I’d rather see some data sharing, rather than opting all installs into data collection, which I think would have negative consequences with some percentage of users.
