I always had full confidence in Opera - until they started making weird things like this. I am still an Opera user - but I am slowly pushed towards the edge.
My point is not, that those speed dial entries are easily spottable and removable, I have two major concerns: privacy and unwanted ads.
Privacy: Adding entries to my personal Speed Dial is a technical way which is prone to be abused in case of a hack, for example. The only person, who should have access to my personal data is me - nobody and nothing else. If you know
Unwanted Ads: Ads are for some of us simply annoying at best. Let's use a picture: You create an e-mail account with a provider, who is proudly telling you that he will not let any spam through. Nice. Once you have your account, he is sending you "promoted e-mails" every few days. You would probably consider them as spam. Why should it be acceptable, that my browser is behaving the same? And moreover my browser is also cluttering the news feed with "promoted ads"?
The least thing I would expect is a switch to turn all "promoted" bs on and that defaults to "off" upon installation - in all versions (desktop, mobile).