As I said, "You can easily verify that it behaves correctly with common network tools".
Track its behavior from an exit node of your network and see whether it matches your rules.
Not really much difference than manually checking some tens of thousands of lines of an open source application, or trusting that the binary you got from the repo corresponds to the source (and of course even hashes can be tampered).
Plus, even if it chose "to not show a specific application making requests" you'd still be blocking all others apps, and thus way better off than not having it installed.
Funnily enough, I vaguely recall that the crack for an older version involved setting a rule where the app would block its own traffic to their own license server. I'm not sure that validating a license counts as data collection, but still pretty funny IMO.
The app costs $35. I presume this is a workable business for the developer, and therefore little economic incentive for data collection or other backdoor/nefarious tactics.
I'm much less trusting of free software like most ad-blockers where I have to wonder how they're really making their money.
It depends what you mean by "free". Of course all software should be handled with varying degrees of skepticism, but open source software can be directly verified (though this also requires building from source), and you don't have to just hope that the author was honest.
