[selfhoster11]

> I don't know - on the other side of the coin imagine if no data was collected. It would be near impossible for companies to do any sort of troubleshooting or QA.

Good. Companies got by in the pre-internet era by running supervised QA tests with customers in person, or using special devices modified to allow surveillance. There's no reason why this cannot be brought back.

[richarme]

Nokia phones used to have a feature called "AutoSMS" which would silently send back crash reports and various usage metrics. Of course this feature was never included in production releases, only for field/user testing. After product launch, feedback was gathered by surveys and crash reports from service centers. Obviously phones have always had the capability to send covert data, but back then it would have been utterly unacceptable. How times & business models have changed :(