Not familiar with this particular brouhaha, but I think opt-in analytics with example reports are the way to go.
I thought the outcry over Audacity was hilarious*, given that even Debian has an (optional) package called popularity-contest that reports on what packages people have installed.
*The part where they were going to use GOOG (iirc) for the analytics was not funny, though. Poor choice. But it was still voluntary.