Why does iotop/taskstats now only work for the root user ?

Issue

• Command iotop is only usable by root.
• When run by regular users it produces a non-intuitive error message
• It exists in /usr/bin and is in section 1 of the man pages
• Should non-root users be allowed to use taskstats for collecting information for their own processes ?
• Is there any other way a local, unprivileged user can gather taskstat information ?
• I want to use taskstats via netlink interface to read I/O statistics as non-root user.