[vkoskiv]

The phrase "...to better understand our [users] and to improve their experience..."

always rings alarm bells in my head. It's corporate lingo for "We want to increase profits by selling your private data for as long as we can get away with it."

[pdpi]

It's very generic phrasing, and some products do hide nefarious behaviour behind it, but it's also just an accurate description of the most innocent, straightforward use of telemetry out there. I, for one, can't think of a way to monetise Firebase stack traces.

This is a game, so let's use other games as examples. Here's two pretty damn good talks from GDC about what the value telemetry brings to the table (the StS one goes into a whole bunch of other stuff that's sort of irrelevant but also serves to motivate the telemetry topic):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urx7WQE6NY0 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rqfbvnO_H0

[pyr0hu]

What private data would you get by tracking minecraft players?

[sli]

First one that immediately comes to mind is knowing when a person has leisure time. Since email is also known, this gets added to whatever body of data that's been collected on the person with that email. You can already make some inferences about a person just based on when they have leisure time, before you even add it to the existing body of data.

[bastardoperator]

This guy knows how to mine diamonds!