Debian popularity-contest is as far as I know opt-in and very innocent compared to most of the telemetry stuff out there. Telemetry by default is evil, but trying to paint Debian as evil is a stretch.
I'm a Debian user and contributor for many years and wrote large parts of the privacy issues page above, based on facts I discovered while using Debian.
Certainly Debian isn't evil, and popcon is indeed opt-in. Popcon does make it possible for all Debian members (who can access the submission data) to probably identify other contributors and possibly others too. Also we do inherit lots of privacy issues from upstream projects. For eg GNOME calculator app in Debian still connects to the IMF and other websites even when.
