App Center GDPR Frequently Asked Questions

Important

Visual Studio App Center is scheduled for retirement on March 31, 2025. While you can continue to use Visual Studio App Center until it is fully retired, there are several recommended alternatives that you may consider migrating to.

Learn more about support timelines and alternatives.

The following content is a list of frequently asked questions for GDPR. If you have additional questions that aren't answered here, contact us.

To meet our GDPR obligations, we've created a DPA. Can you sign it and send it back to us?

For operational reasons, we aren't signing agreements sent to us by our customers. The terms and agreements of our product are here: Azure Legal Information. GDPR-specific terms are near the end of the Azure Online Service Terms.

What personal information does your service store?

The information stored by HockeyApp or App Center depends on several factors including how you've configured the SDK, what data your application handles, and so on. For example, if your application transmits crashes back, our services can't determine what personal information is in the stack trace or crash dump.

GDPR - what type of data does App Center collect?

You can see the data App Center collects by turning on verbose logging. (Although the article is specific to React Native, you can use the API for all app platforms). Then look at the HTTP logs, which contain headers and JSON payload to see the data type.

For HockeyApp and App Center SxS users, the data that HockeyApp collects can be found at https://hockeyapp.net/blog/2016/05/09/user-metrics-and-privacy.html.

How to submit GDPR DSR (Data Subject Right) Delete and Export requests for App Center

App Center customers can exercise their rights as data subjects by submitting DSR requests using GDPR-specific API methods. You can find more information on how to submit a DSR Delete and Export request in GDPR.

App Store privacy report

Here you can find answers to questions for the App Store privacy report. Please notice, that we do not filter the information you send us in the logs and custom exception messages. So if you are sending some personal data or user ids in analytic events, you should mention it in a privacy report. The answers below only apply to data that App Center collects itself, provided that you do not send us analytics events or custom exceptions.

Data collection

App Center collects only diagnostic data such as crash data and performance data. We collect and store crash stack traces and analytics information: the number of app starts and restarts.

Data use

We use data for "Analytics" and "Other Purposes". "Other Purposes" means collecting crash reports to improve the stability of the app.

Data linked to the user

The data collected by App Center is not linked with a user and does not contain any personal information.

Tracking

App Center only collects information about the country/region of use of the device based on cellular data (for all platforms except Windows). This information is stored without reference to the user and is only used to display usage statistics in different regions. For Windows, App Center does not collect any geo location tracking by default.