I'm not sure that argument works.
If we expand a bit, It wouldn't be difficult to find that governments are mostly comprised of <industry> illiterate politicians. There is no need for a government to be comprised of digital advertisement industry specialists in order to pass meaningful industry regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
And a few where we dodged a billet.
It is a secret, though. Outside of you, me, and a few other folks like ourselves, users of this software have no idea what's going on behind the curtains. There is no overt disclosure to the user explaining the myriad communication exchange, occurring on a nearly constant basis, between their device and some remote server(s); much less giving the user a say in the matter.
Stating the use of the word "surreptitious" (to act in a clandestine manner; exactly how these communications are executed) amounts to a mere quibble is disingenuous.
I can't say I completely understand the scenario, but if you're talking about a user filling out a form, then submitting that form, then no. That would be expected behavior.
Data may be encoded in any number of encodings depending on need. Encoded data isn't always human readable; especially so during secure transmission. It's not so much the inability for a human to read the encoded data as it is the data being consisting of only what is necessary to perform the action expected by the user; those expectations, of course, set via whichever means the user is interacting with the software.
Please correct me if I've misunderstood.
There is no easy way to tell whether an app shares data with third-parties without setting up an MITM proxy or a packet capture. As far as the majority of users are concerned it is a secret.
