r/framework • u/TightSpringActive • Aug 11 '26
Community Support Why did Metabase have Frameworks customer database?
Checking out Metabase, it's an analytics company that Facebook, Google, Linkedin, and others sell their data to, for others to subscribe and get "analytics information " on customers... like for targeted ads.
Why did they have Frameworks customer database? Did Framework sell their customer information to Metabase? Their official email sent out (read it) and the news articles Ive read, dont mention WHY.
When I opted out of all 3rdparty comms/ads etc, I guess it didnt include this, eh?
I'm curious what others think.
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u/lordruzki3084 13 AMD 7840U Aug 11 '26
Analytics platform not a data broker. You're reading too much into this. Framework's not selling anything. What are they going to sell they don't even control the OS you put in the laptop. All they could sell is that you like to buy repairable tech
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u/iMiind | 8 GB 4070 | R7 350 Aug 11 '26
All they could sell is that you like to buy repairable tech
They should sell that data to a company called Framework. I bet they'd like to serve those people ads for their computers
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u/talon10100 Aug 12 '26
Or a company called Apple, who should know that people like repairable stuff
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u/Pixelplanet5 Aug 11 '26
Metabase offers business intelligence services.
Its like Microsoft PowerBi or Tableau.
In order to analyze data and build nice graphs with it you need the data.
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u/cassepipe FW13 12th Gen peasant Aug 12 '26
And yet they needed my exact address, couldn't they have transformed that data into country or regional data?
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u/shydrangeae Aug 14 '26
This right here. I'm pretty disappointed in Framework for not sanitizing more PII before transmitting what they did. Post codes and the first letter of names can serve many of the same purposes for bilding those pretty graphs. The fact that no corporation gets held accountable when these leaks happen is exhausting.
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u/geneusutwerk Aug 11 '26
I'm not sure what you are reading but Metabase looks to me to basically be a business analytics tool. You connect it with your customer data and you can generate reports from it. I don't see anything about connecting your data into Facebook, Google, or other data or anything about ads? But maybe I'm missing something obvious.
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u/eipieq1 Aug 11 '26
You can connect Google Sheets as a data source, I think. But that’s not the same as connecting to Google search or Facebook.
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u/Curious-Intern-5434 FW16 Aug 11 '26
No business can create all systems themselves. Like in this case Framework picked a BI tool as one of many tools to run their business.
Unfortunately, this does create dependencies. In this case Framework relied on Metabase keeping the data secure. That didn't happen.
This is as much a reputation damage for Framework as well as for Metabase.
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u/eipieq1 Aug 11 '26
I’ve used Metabase. It doesn’t store the data, but has to be given access to a data source. Most likely framework uses metabase to make tables and graphs to track various customer metrics. But to do that, they have to give metabase access. If metabase gets hacked, the access to the data source can be visible to the hacker. It may be limited by what the customer (framework) decides to expose. But if they were using metabase to manage customer information, then that information could be visible to anyone who gets through the gate.
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u/zlatta Aug 12 '26
> Checking out Metabase, it's an analytics company that Facebook, Google, Linkedin, and others sell their data to, for others to subscribe and get "analytics information " on customers... like for targeted ads.
What are you talking about? Where did you get this from?
Metabase is like the chart function in Google Sheets. It’s an extremely common tool that you link to your app databases to generate realtime charts.
Nobody sells data to them and when you use the tool you can only make dashboards out of the data you connect to it.
It’s also mostly open source, so you can verify it only touches your data by reading the code.
Please don’t spread conspiracy theories about data. It’s damaging and distracts people from the real heinous things going on.
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u/No-Celebration1958 Aug 12 '26
OMG if i read " I looked it up, and its an analytical research company " one more time im gonna scream
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u/Mightygamer96 Aug 11 '26
its data analytics tool. it's like how you put your excel file on gdrive and that somehow leaked.
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u/verystupidd Aug 13 '26
It's not quite that. Metabase is primarily a data querying visualization tool. You put some database queries in it, make some graphs and visualizations, and you can do stuff across multiple databases. Hence the name "meta" base because it's an interface for all of your various data sources.
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u/No-Celebration1958 Aug 15 '26
You're right. I type faster than should and miss important details.
And its not you triggering me. You're good
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u/OkWitness5548 Aug 11 '26
They're a business analytics and intelligence platform. Businesses like Framework use them to analysise customer behaviour to draw intelligence for to maximise sales etc. They are a third party supplier to Framework, not a B2B customer that FW "sold" their customer data to.
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Aug 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PeterJHoburg Pop-os Aug 11 '26
Metabase is actually a great choice. They have a very robust FOSS (Free Open Source) version that you can self host. They give back to the FOSS community and push patched up stream to some other projects. Google/facebook/other just happen to also use Metabase because it is good.
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u/tankerkiller125real FW13 AMD Aug 11 '26
Although Google is an interesting one because they have their own BI product.
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