Hi @Neil_Brown thanks for getting in touch with us.
We get you, you need to know. So allow me to ellaborate on what the mobile apps do (since this applies to both iOS and Android).
As you’ve seen we use Amplitue for events related to appliaction usage. This allows us to understand what works and what doesn’t with the app /servie, and try and improve it. Note that this is only used when connecting to meet.jit.si, if you use your own server not a single data point is sent.
Next is Crashlytics. It’s a crash reporting tool that allows us to get crashes and stack traces. This is invaluable when running in production sine we are blind otherwise. To give you an example: since the current COVID-19 crisis started we have seen huge growth, and with that also come problems. We have made numerous app updates, almost all of them addressing crashes and problems we have seen thanks to this tool.
I’ll look into disabling Crashlytics for non meet.jit.si deployments, but I cannot guarantee we’ll be able to, since it uses system hooks to be able to get the crash data.
We are very privacy minded ourselves, and these are the minimum things we think are needed to operate the service with quality. We recently updated our privacy policy and terms of service to make it very clear: https://jitsi.org/meet-jit-si-terms-of-service/ and https://jitsi.org/meet-jit-si-privacy/
If these are insurmountable issues for you, you are welcome to use the Jitsi Meet app from F-Droid (Android only, alas). It’s built with a special build time flag which results in a “libre build”, with no Google dependencies, analytics or crsash reporting of any kind. This means that it will also be a lot harder for us to help with problems, since we are cannot see them.
Last, none of this is new. Our apps and web are open source and are available at https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet including the crashlytics integration.
I hope that helps.
Cheers,
