>Most people are not aware of telemetry. Most of those that are, disable it.
Do you have some numbers to back this up? I would suggest getting that before making any major product decisions. Also if you read the privacy policy, the telemetry is spelled out in detail, or at least it should be, so the people who are voting should be well aware of what is going on. If nobody reads it, then the solution there would then be to make it obvious and easy to read, not to throw it out completely.
>I fully agree, that is the other reason zero telemetry is a way to go and should be default. You can not beat that.
I don't understand. That isn't a meaningful comparison because you're comparing it with nothing, you would need to present an alternate data source. This to me is kind of like saying "not having a stomach beats having a stomach because you won't need to worry about eating anymore" or something like that.
>Imagine in an election, the votes of those who didn't explicitly vote get automatically extracted and cast based on a biased algorithm produced by the government.
I'm sorry but this is exactly what various governments already do in a lot of cases. Not for general elections but for services or programs that they run or for appointed positions. They will do a study with passive data gathering and determine who is actually using what services, and if the results are good they will increase funding to the service, otherwise they will cut funding, fire people, etc. This is generally how any organization functions at scale, so I really don't understand what you're getting at here or what alternative you're proposing. If you want to apply this to product development, it would simply be infeasible for users to vote on every single ticket that a developer handles, so you need to find some other data-driven way to make decisions. That's what telemetry is put in place to do. I think there is a misunderstanding here of how this works, but it's not your fault.
I wish you luck with your company, but I suspect you will have difficulty getting funding on the level of Firefox or Chrome, especially if you have no hard data from some kind of telemetry or similar source. The privacy-conscious user is known to be a fickle market. I also would advise against making misleading and/or unsourced statements about other browsers if you intend to develop a competing product, this makes your company look bad.