Applications updating & phoning home
Personally I believe that any application packaged for Debian should neither phone home, attempt to download plugins over HTTP at run-time, or update itself.
On that basis I've filed #761828.
As a project we have guidelines for what constitutes a "serious" bug, which generally boil down to a package containing a security issue, causing data-loss, or being unusuable.
I'd like to propose that these kind of tracking "things" are equally bad. If consensus could be reached that would be a good thing for the freedom of our users.
(Ooops I slipped into "us", "our user", I'm just an outsider looking in. Mostly.)