Customers can (optionally) submit crash logs via email or support portal.

Apple iOS provides crash logs via the following navigation path:

  Privacy & Security
    Analytics Data
      AppName-date-time.ips

Notice Apple's choice of top-level menu for crash logs?

Makes sense to me. Many exploits use a crash as their wedge into a system.

And of course you've reported every single crash you've encountered via email or support portal?

Normal people don't email support with crash logs, they just grumble about it to their coworkers and don't help fix the problem. You can't fix a problem you don't know about.

> You can't fix a problem you don't know about.

And yet we don't have home inspectors coming into our homes unannounced every week just to make sure everything is ok. Why is it that software engineers feel so entitled to do things that no other profession does?

Because software is digital and different than the physical world and someone like you understands that. It's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. How hard is it to make a copy of your house including all the things inside of it? Can you remove all personally identifying features from your house with a computer program? Analogies have their limitations and don't always lead to rational conclusions. Physicists had to contend with a lot of those after Stephen Hawking wrote his book about black holes with crazy theories that don't make sense if you know the math behind them.

Downloading a torrent isn't the same thing as going to the record store and physically stealing a CD, and regular people can also understand that there's a difference between the invasiveness of a human being entering your house and someone not doing that. So either people can understand torrenting isn't the same as going into a store a physically stealing something and anonymized crash logs aren't the same thing as a home inspector coming into your house, or Napster and torrenters actually owe the millions that the RIAA and MPAA want them to.

I'm not saying that all tracking is unequivocally good, or even okay, some of it is downright bad. But let's not treat people as idiots who can't tell the difference between the digital and physical realm.

Once it is running on a computer you don't own, it is no longer your software.

To put it in the language of someone who mistakenly thinks you can own information: data about crashes on computers that aren't yours simply doesn't belong to you.

If you don't feel a responsibility for inflicting pain on other people, that's on you. I'm not a sociopath.

The pain of a possible future panopticon dwarfs the "pain" of some software crashing. Considering long-term outcomes does not make you a sociopath - quite the opposite.

Ah, the slippery slope fallacy!

It's just a matter of ownership and entitlement. You believe you are entitled to things other people own, that is on their property, because you have provided a service to them that's somehow related.

Outside of specifically silicon valley, that level of entitlement is unheard of. Once you put it in human terms what you're asking for, it sounds absolutely outrageous. Because it is - you and I just exist in a bubble.

This can all be avoided and you can have you cake, too. Run the software on your metal. That's what my company does and it's great in many ways. We have a level of introspection into our application execution that other developers can only dream of. Forget logging, we can just debug it.