Is there an opt-out? Or, more importantly, was there an explicit opt-in?
Data from crashes on my device is still my data, not Google's. Google can pop up an alert telling me things went pear-shaped, and then ask to send it back to the devs for analysis.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The crash data is needed for debugging. It's debatable if it's your data, it's the developer's misbehaving code. An app can be architected so more of the code runs on the server than on the client, if an action you took on the client causes a crash on ny server I'm not going to ask you for permission to look at my crash logs.
Not by me. I'm not going to debug the app; I'm just going to kill it and restart it. If the developer of the app wants my data to help his debugging, he needs to ask.
> if an action you took on the client causes a crash on my server I'm not going to ask you for permission to look at my crash logs.
Of course not, but your crash logs aren't coming from my phone. If you want to look at data from my phone, you need to ask.
Is there an opt-out? Or, more importantly, was there an explicit opt-in?
Data from crashes on my device is still my data, not Google's. Google can pop up an alert telling me things went pear-shaped, and then ask to send it back to the devs for analysis.