[prongletown]

I'm not making a moral judgement (FB is a big yikes), just technical. They'd have to:

- build lists of every phone, including carrier variant and internal revisions (pretty common!), to make sure they could be sure they had a complete library

- rely on the manufacturer to publicly post the ROM (cheaper mfg wont do this) (or somehow retrieve the URL from the update mechanism, said URL not easily accessible from userspace)

- handle the multiple different packaging mechanisms that android phones, especially older versions use (Google has gone a long way in remediating this but FB has to support billions of devices that don't adhere to best practices).

- For ROM packages that are encrypted, they'd need to acquire the keys from real devices.

- and they still would not have visibility into non-posted firmware, such as factory versions with day 1 upgrades (aka many many devices)

OR

- grab the files and send 'em

[MauranKilom]

1. Uploading files from the user phone to their servers is straight up copyright violation in plenty of cases.

2. I have doubts that you need copies of all kinds of system libraries to debug that crash. They won't help you debug a crash dump (assuming they don't have debug symbols left in for some reason). They generally won't help you reproduce the crash unless you actually know reproduction steps - it wouldn't surprise me if they tracked every user action, but I doubt they do - so it takes many of those crashes to even start debugging. At that point you probably know precisely which library you need and can obtain it legally.

That said, I agree that uploading the files themselves is not necessary to fingerprint users (the hashes would totally suffice). Unless they do the uploading as a cover-up story, which doesn't make much sense either.

[shuckles]

At the very least, the privacy-respecting solution would be to upload hashes and only upload libraries once some critical mass of users had reported the hash along with a bug. Even then, you would only upload the files themselves from some capped number of users.

[janekm]

That makes no difference from a privacy point of view but would be more respectful of people’s bandwidth limits.

[austinheap]

But...what about my pitchfork? The knee-jerk reaction to every Facebook blog spam entirely diminishes the harm they've done to nations around the world.

[vvanders]

Yeah sorry, they could send ro.build.fingerprint instead if they really wanted to know what version of builds and devices out there are causing issues.

I can see this as an opt-in but not as a silent, default behavior.