My gut feeling is that anything, which is collected from my side, whether PII or not, protected or not, should only take place after I get a message on first run, asking me if it's okay to collect usage data. Including a brief list of what data is collected, whether it's anonimized, pseudomized, etc and allow me to say "no".
Anything collected before I have any chance of opt-in or opt-out to me sounds like "we proactively have already started collecting data. If you don't want this to go on, you can switch it off in settings" and leaves a smell of privacy pooh on my desktop.
In other words: It's a dishonest behaviour to me if I am NOT aware of things going on before things start to happen.