As a company, we have to have some way to measure our userbase, and we felt this was the least intrusive way possible. And you can opt-out.
A more responsible way to do this would be to generate a random unique identifier, instead of one that could be guess ahead of time, and make phoning home an opt-in feature.
Your claim that user can opt out is disingenuous - most users aren't going to know how to change a .desktop file to alter command line options.
For practical purposes options that can't be configured through the GUI don't exist.