Hacker News Reader

Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

This text does not appear in the link. I do see:

>Call Logs: We collect information about calls made using Phones, including the phone numbers you call or receive calls from, the date/time of the calls, and the length of the calls. We also collect network quality metrics and other technical data related to call performance. Please note that we do not record calls.

The version of the privacy policy cited in the previous discussion cited that voice audio is collected for the purposes of forwarding it to the other phone.

View on HN

In addition to collecting all the metadata they also collect the voices of children recorded in voicemails.

Their policy says that the information they collect is used to "Send you marketing communications (see the section below for information about how to opt out of these communications at any time)" and to "Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Phones and Services, including to generate de-identified, anonymized, or aggregated data" and to "Target advertisements to you on third-party platforms and websites (for more information and to opt out, see the Targeted Advertising and Analytics section below)"

Remember that "de-identified" and "anonymized" is a lie. De-identified data can be re-identified, and anonymized data can be de-anonymized. Often trivially. There are even situations where individuals can be identified from aggregated data.

It would be better if they specifically excluded advertising uses of call metadata, etc. I assume this is getting mixed in from their ecommerce efforts to sell the devices. But how do you expect them to play back the voicemail if they don’t have it? What would be the point of "please leave a message after the beep" if the audio is going to /dev/null?

If it's a landline it could store the voicemail on device, which is how phones used to work (or prior to that, you'd plug an answering machine into the phone, but it was still "with the phone"). A GB of flash would be basically unlimited and cost a couple cents. You could play an old school "your call could not be completed as dialed" message if it's actually unavailable due to a power/network outage or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com