In reply to James.

Otto, I think that james is pointing the finger at the wrong direction, but basically he is right, as no one ever communicates the privacy challenges that come from operating wordpress.

I 100% trust your words about what you do with the data, but you are unlikely to do the same thing for the rest of your life, so just trusting one person is just not good enough. In addition wordpress.org is a golden hacking target. You know that you are deleting files every two days but you don't know what the hacker that copies them (hopefully it doesn't actually happen) do with them.

Anything that might impact privacy should be opt-in not opt-out. Wordpress core can use whatever scare tactics they want to make people opy-in, but it should be the decision of the site admin. Yes there are plugins that do that, but if the admin doesn't really aware to the implications of automatic updates, he is not likely to use them.