Not only bad actors would be concerned. There is a rather small but vocal minority that values privacy extremely high. They make noise, even when a threat of identification, or of siphoning out any consequential information, is extremely low.
To avoid sabotaging their own platform, Intel should remember about that, and give no food for bad PR.
As they write in employment agreements, you should avoid any real conflicts of interests, and also any appearance of conflicts of interests, because if it gets reported in media, but you end up completely clean and conflict-free, the hard-to-repair damage to public perception already would have been done.
Yeah there might be one person discussing this in social media that legitimately values privacy.
If you value privacy, you aren't using Windows. If you value privacy, you should realize that most people only care about it to the extent of it just working, and it only does so for most people running major Windows and macOS desktop operating systems If you value privacy, then you know how to read Microsoft's privacy policy to know what your data is going towards on Windows. And if you value privacy, you can respect why Intel is doing this and also read their privacy policy as to how they use the data.
People are fear-mongering that Intel is taking usage data as if Intel has some interest in using the data maliciously. None of these major companies increasing and gathering telemetry have used the data in a truly malicious manner, unless you twist the wording for specific situations where bad-actors got caught doing bad-actor activity and have to comply with legal requests for information.
This is only beneficial for the audience Intel is targeting.
To avoid sabotaging their own platform, Intel should remember about that, and give no food for bad PR.
As they write in employment agreements, you should avoid any real conflicts of interests, and also any appearance of conflicts of interests, because if it gets reported in media, but you end up completely clean and conflict-free, the hard-to-repair damage to public perception already would have been done.