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Comment by kevinbowman | Hacker News Reader

Wow: "For applications on Google Play that integrate this tool, usage is tracked" without even an option to disable that. Sure, it's open source so can be changed by editing the source code, but does anyone else find that kinda creepy?

e.g. if I make an app using 10 FOSS libraries, then I wouldn't want my app reporting to 10 different places everything which the user is doing.

Also, on the actual homepage for it (http://google.github.io/flatbuffers), the only mention of this call-home feature is buried at the bottom of the "building" page.

[EDIT] This is incorrect; see below comments about this tracking not being a call-home feature but instead just Google scanning apps submitted to the Play Store

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I'm a bit confused. Is it actually calling home? That seems kind of unlikely, given that a) that seems pretty egregious for a library like this, and b) they said this doesn't affect the application at all beyond consuming "a few bytes".

Could it instead be just that Google scans Google Play apps for a string in the binary that matches the Flatbuffers version string format? That seems more likely given what the README does say about this. And it also seems more useful in general; Google would benefit more from knowing how many applications use the library than knowing how popular these applications are.

> Could it instead be just that Google scans Google Play apps for a string in the binary that matches the Flatbuffers version string format?

Of course that's what's happening: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/include/fl...

Ah yes, that's possible; I'm not sure why I leapt to that conclusion. In that case, an app which uses this library and is only published on the Amazon Android App Store would not be tracked I guess.

I actually find it kind of interesting that I mentally turned "tracked" into "calls home".

I don't see an issue with adding a string letting the Play Store scanner know that we use this lib. It is reporting who the users of this lib are (the apps that implement it), and not informing on the app users themselves.

It seems like a very good way to jauge the interest for this lib on Android in order to decide how much resource they will allow to its dev.

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