I agree that this nontransparent change is not the way to go, and I feel these stats should be available to plugin authors. Also, for end users these stats do give an idea of how popular the plugin actually is at a given time. Pretty useful in my opinion. But …

Why not take control and register the plugin installs yourself? Build a small piece of central software, report some details to that when your plugin is installed and activated. You’d be able to gather a lot more details and statistics of the use of your plugin. You could gather a lot of meta data about the wp install, for example.

This might cause GDPR/AVG and plugin guidelines issues though, I’m not entirely sure.