

There are many tiers of private information.
You can definetly collect a lot of useful telemetry data without collecting any of the, lets say, “most sensitive” private information.
Just to exemplify:
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you can collect telemetry on the most acessed features of a software and associate it with their location: whilst collecting their location you can definetly choose between having the person’s specific location (GPS coordinates with a few meters of accuracy) or their broad location (i.e.: their city, state, or country).
- with the broad location you can have insights on how users of your software behave per region and plan accordinly actions or those regions.
Collecting someones specific location is definetly way more sensitive than their broad location…
And the full content of all textual documents a person generates has a very high chance of containing of their most sensitive private information…
Just as a referenced for “second brain” local apps I suggest to look at dendron. Dendron is no longer being maintained but it still works and I use it for my notes since I adopted it a few year ago, it’s pretty great for programmers since it works on top of VS Code.