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).

Crash reporting can be important, but there isn't a requirement to use an advertising company to facilitate it.

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.

> it's not to populate additional user data to their ad or search algorithms.

How do you know this?

Is it "pedantic hand-wringing" to not want my DNA analyzed by an advertising company as well?

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.