Crash reports often include pseudonymous information, like device type, OS version etc., that help you understand the environment your crash occurred in. They also very often include identifiers that aren't personal, but allow you to understand whether this crash that happened 100 times happened for 100 users or just 100 times for the same user all over. That's very important information to have when debugging. The verdict is still out in many legal jurisdictions on whether such pseudonymous information is private enough. The classic example is IP addresses.

Pseudonymous information always has a high risk of being abused for fingerprinting and thus denonymising. I feel that there needs to be a trade-off though: on public datasets, people should be very careful with pseudonymous identifiers. On things like crash diagnostics that are never meant to be shared I feel they're perfectly fine. That's why I dislike a general discussion where all PII is bad and evil without context.

Absolutely agree! I’ve pushed back in the past when more analytics-type data was being considered. It can definitely be done anonymously and I believe users should always be given transparent options.