Stating that this is on by default is misleading. If you or your company pay for the product or if you use the open source (“community”) or EAP version of it, it’s disabled by default.

The option is only enabled by default in one very specific use case:

We are asking our users to help with this, and here’s how it works:

• For companies: Admins can enable data sharing at a company-wide level. To support early adopters, we’re offering a limited number of free All Products Pack subscriptions to organizations willing to participate while we explore this program. For companies that are not willing to opt in to the program, nothing changes, and as always, admins are in control.
• For individuals on non-commercial licenses: Data sharing is enabled by default, but you can turn it off anytime in the settings.
• For individuals using commercial licenses, free trials, free community licenses, or EAP builds: Nothing changes. You can still opt in via the settings if you are willing to share data with JetBrains (and your admins, if any, allow it).

For reference, the non-commercial licenses are the full, commercial versions of the IDE provided “at no cost for education, hobby projects, and open-source work.” The risk of entering confidential data into your IDE that could then get collected is much lower for these use cases… though still not zero.

Do those users get a notification of this change when installing an update? If not, that’s concerning. But if they do, and can then quickly opt out if desired, then this really seems like a non-issue. This is especially true since JetBrains makes it clear that being able to anonymously collect data is the reason they’re able to offer those products for free; thus why users on those licenses cannot opt out of that anonymous data collection.

It’s pretty clear that JetBrains is saying “We would like your data so we can improve our product; if you’re okay with that, we’ll let you use our tools for free.” And they also have options, free and paid, where you don’t have to give up your data. Seems like a reasonable trade for a person to be able to make to me.