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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Every single app on your phone will use such service (Android or iOS,).

You're not wrong about ownership of data. But highlighting Ring and Google in this manner is some seriously biased and dishonest reporting.

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This is a company already trusted with extremely sensitive information and who have suffered a stream of stories suggesting they may not be fulfilling that trust in the way a reasonable customer might expect, all the while while charging users enough of a price that the service isn't obviously ad/data sale supported.

The bar should be a lot higher for them, it's not some free tic-tac-toe app.

iOS crash reporting and analytics are built in, but requires explicit user opt-in. It's not a requirement that an iOS app use Crashlytics or similar to get this sort of data, so saying "every single app will use such service" is not exactly truthful. And, besides, saying that "everyone does it" is not an excuse for the behavior.

Highlighting Ring makes sense as it represents a new dimension in terms of data collection and data risk. Highlighting Google and Facebook makes sense as they are the major data collectors who take great liberties in using the data to help undermining democracy and manipulate individuals through hyper targeted advertisements.

Well maybe Ring shouldn't have bundled so many third party trackers.

If it really were just crash reporting, this would have probably gone unreported on.

This may be an excessively optimistic read. A person has to know a reasonable amount about software systems and common development practices to decide crash reporting isn't worth writing about.

The bar to deciding that Google is getting user's data somehow and this is newsworthy is lower, and requires no grasp of underlying details. Technology journalists are often journalists first, and technologists second if at all. I don't blame them, it's the nature of the job.

Worth noting that "crash reporting" is very much worth reporting on and paying attention to, as transmitting a lot of sensitive data in crash reports could be beneficial to fixing bugs (but obviously not beneficial to the indiviual's rights).

Crash reporting can be important, but there isn't a requirement to use an advertising company to facilitate it.

This sort of pedantic hand-wringing is tiring. Google sells many things, one of which is advertising. Firebase Crashlytics may be free, but it's made available by Google in the hopes that developers pay for Firebase's full suite of paid offerings—it's not to populate additional user data to their ad or search algorithms.

> it's not to populate additional user data to their ad or search algorithms.

How do you know this?

Is it "pedantic hand-wringing" to not want my DNA analyzed by an advertising company as well?

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