Furthermore, Otel doesn't by itself share anything with third parties. It's quite common to pipe it into a local monitoring solution. This data can be invaluable for keeping a service running.
This could be extended and configured for evil, but looks useful as it stands.
@louis FYI, this isn't implementing "traditional" telemetry at all. It's simply adding more granular logging to the instance itself, so they can track down which search terms take longer. It's not generating any 'extra' requests, or reporting anything to .social (unless you're on .social, of course) or even reporting client-side behaviors. It's just a fancy way of adding logic akin to print(account, searchTerm, requestDuration) to the search endpoint, which any admin can already do easily if they wanted that info.