Hi everyone,
We completely understand your concerns shared in this thread. Thanks, as always for your feedback.
Using the data collected, our goal is to resolve a number of business challenges we face with regards to the production planning of spare parts and software maintenance.
This information allows us to measure whether Fairphone devices are actually used longer, as a proof point for our company’s mission, and it allows us to better plan production, so that we can order the spare parts our customers need. The collection of the software and device information also helps us recognise certain hardware to network issues more quickly and to resolve these issues more efficiently. For example, showing a device issue was tied to a specific network operator, a specific country and/or a specific security update.
We have a legitimate interest to collect this data but even so, after internal review, we found that in the design of the application certain functionalities were not clearly communicated. Our software developers are currently fixing this to include a toggle for opt-out in the settings.
That said, please note that this information is not shared with third parties, it is only used internally for statistical purposes and you may at any time object to the processing by following the process described in the Fairphone Privacy Policy. To optimize this process and offer a better customer experience, we plan to make this process more user-friendly and transparent in the coming months too.
We’ll keep you updated here as these improvements are implemented.