What would the purpose of collecting such information be from a "we only use this for better targeting ads" perspective? Establishing relationships in the case of "if someone you talk to regularly is interested in xyz you might be too"?
>Google also provided clarification on the purposes of some of
the data collection observed. Namely:
>1) The message hash is collected for detecting message
sequencing bugs.
>2) Phone numbers are collected to improve regex pattern
matching for automatic recognition of one-time pass-
words sent over RCS. Messages automatically recognizes
incoming One-Time Password (OTP) codes to avoid the
user having to fill them in. This can be a frequent point
of failure and the phone number data is used to improve
recognition by providing ground-truth based on known
OTP sender numbers.
> 3) The ICCID data is used to support Google Fi.
> 4) Firebase Analytics logging of events (not including phone
numbers) is used to measure the effectiveness of app
download promotions (for Messages and Dialer specif-
ically). Namely, to measure not only whether the app
was downloaded but also whether it was used once
downloaded.
