I don't think this is always true. When I get an error message or some sort of error while using a program on my private PC I don't mind sending the error code and telemetry data to the devs, because it hopefully helps them to find and hopefully fix errors in the software I am using and therefore is a win-win situation in my opinion at least.
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It is always true that you should ask. In this case, you have no qualms living with opt in, versus opt out. In this case, you can live with the minority rule [0] with no impact to your function.
[0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Amos (Rust's fasterthanlime) has pointed out that opt-in causes a problem which the "Eh, they can always opt in if they care" crowd don't spot until it's too late.
The telemetry is collected at time T, and your decision that you care must come before time T if it's to have any effect on the outcomes. After the telemetry is collected, and decisions are taken based on that telemetry, it's too late to opt in.
This reflect a common problem with humans that what they don't like is regret, but what we offer them as a fix is informed consent -- it turns out what they wanted to be informed about was really whether they would in future regret it, which we cannot know.
Now, as a democracy we "fix" this by just deciding that even if you refuse to participate in the process we don't get to claim that your interests don't matter. That feels like a reasonable price to pay for very important decisions like "Should we build a freeway across this land occupied by the people from this weird religious sect?" but it feels way out of proportion for something like, "Should I add more animated Emoji reactions to version X, or should I work on enabling the text-to-speech feature in group chats as well as one-to-one ?"
Laws like GDPR can help organisations stick to collecting only what they actually needed to know and not just "Everything because why not" - GDPR is why not. Did you just collect the full name of every user? You'd better have a damn good explanation of why you did that. Whether user has <4GB, 4GB-8GB or 8GB+ of RAM? Very easy to justify.