This is a poor analogy - while it's certainly a debatable practice, nobody is being 'stopped', and this isn't comparable to going through anybody's pockets or digging up other unrelated info about their lives. Even the article here explicitly assumes that all the data is not personally identifiable, and I'd be very surprised if that's not correct (because otherwise they'd be begging for a GDPR problem).
Also though, interestingly Walmart actually really does do the equivalent of this: https://bernardmarr.com/walmart-big-data-analytics-at-the-wo.... They have real-time detailed metrics for individual customer transaction behaviour in stores, and I would not be surprised at all if they tracked lots more, e.g. the total number of cars in parking lots, how long different cohorts of customers spend in stores, etc.
In fact the article is wrong.
Doesn't matter what data they do collect, they need to establish a connection to the telemetry server and that exposes the IP (which is Personally Identifiable information) without the user's consent.
https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/
And the problem is even bigger, how do i know what data is being collected? even if it declared publicly somewhere, do i need to check on each update if the collected data has changed?
> otherwise they'd be begging for a GDPR problem
They have in fact a GDPR problem but like in the case above where it was not Google to answer for the GDPR Problem but the site that used Google CDN, in this case too, most probably it will not be these toolmakers who are taken to court but the companies that asking their employees to use these tools without disclosing this personal IP leak.
If this becomes the norm how much burdon do we have to go through to verify each tool whether we need to ammend the employee GDPR consents or not?
I see this already having an effect... Just standardise only on Microsoft tools so at least we need to gather GDPR consent only for Exposing data to Microsoft...
Also though, interestingly Walmart actually really does do the equivalent of this: https://bernardmarr.com/walmart-big-data-analytics-at-the-wo.... They have real-time detailed metrics for individual customer transaction behaviour in stores, and I would not be surprised at all if they tracked lots more, e.g. the total number of cars in parking lots, how long different cohorts of customers spend in stores, etc.