Which partners? In what form? For what purpose? Are we talking about cache data like Amazon Silk? Encrypted backups?
It doesn’t help the discussion to conflate user agents with third party applications.
But user agents do sometimes push our private data to their own servers — like Chrome’s Omnibar — and if and where that is happening, and how that data is used, absolutely should be disclosed by the device manufacturer.
If the bit about "on their servers" didn't refer to device partners I would have expected Facebooks response[1] to the article to call that out as misleading, but it didn't. I hope too we'll see details somewhere to get a better judgement of how bad/not bad it is.
I had not read Facebook’s response but it seems to me to perfectly describe what actually occurred with these APIs and highlights what NYT got wrong with this story.
