I'm no fan of Ledger's stance on user data and privacy, but this is not unique to them or even unique to hardware wallets. If you use any wallet which goes through any server which is not your own server pointed at your own node, then whoever runs that server will absolutely be able to see your IP address and details of every address you query and every transaction you make, as well as any other unique identifiers the wallet software communicates to them, and can keep that data for as long as they want and share it with anyone that they want.
This is only partially true, because I can use Electrum or some other wallet that maybe have records of my IP addresses and transactions, but they are not sharing that info with any partners of parties that pay more, and they don't keep this data for five years.
In Trezor hardware wallet used with Trezor Suite app I can disable sending of all information (in settings) and I can enable Tor to hide my IP address.
This is what Trezor can collect if you enable anonymous data collection:
https://docs.trezor.io/trezor-suite/misc/analytics.htmlis there no way to do this offline?
There is no way you can update ledger offline and you must use normal computer, not a mobile device for this process.
Not to be snarky but how do you know what data I am keeping / selling if you connect to my electrum node.
Unless you are running it yourself you really don't know.
Side note, although a magnitude or two or three more difficult and expensive same thing can be done with lightning.
Build enough nodes connected to each other and some major services that use it. Set the fees to 0 so other nodes will route through you and you could get a decent picture to a certain extent of what is going where.
Not perfect, but still.
Back to ledger collecting data if you need an app to update your HW wallet and just can't plug it in and upload a file to it, then yeah you never can trust what they are doing.
-Dave