I feel like the benefits outweigh the potential for downsides. Seeing potential is immediately obvious - but a company having anonymous application launch data seems harmless, and finding a way that the information you're sending them could directly impact your life in a negative way seems like a snipe hunt. Especially if you limit it to scenarios where the data benefits their company and negatively impacts you - it just doesn't seem realistic.

I may be biased here though - I do a lot of work on user interface tailoring for Microsoft, which inherently requires a lot of tracking.