There is a need though. I used to view companies as producing laptops or vehicles or whatever. From that frame of reference, there's no need to collect this kind of data. These days I look at them as profit-producing entities. That is their main product is profit. Laptops and vehicles are temporary side effects. From this frame of reference, they need to store this data as it's another means to produce more profit. For example by more accurately targetting their prices to maximize profit, or selling the data in the future when they can't grow profits from their laptops. I'm convinced this is the correct frame to view the vast majority of for-profit companies because it predicts their actions much more accurately than the other one.

Like yes, it's technically not Framework's fault

I know it's a third party vendor that got hacked, but I really think the blame still falls on the company that contracted with the vendor.

Framework decided to hire this company and companies need to recognize the risk in hiring SaaS companies. I know at my previous job we had to go through security and privacy compliance reviews to decide it was even worth sharing data with a third party vendor.

Too many companies have a ton of SaaS providers and shovel customer data to each one.

The email also mentions: Billing and shipping address information was leaked.

Metabase isn't AI, here Business Intelligence means BI tools, basically things that query a lot of data to get fancy charts, mostly for managers and bean counters.

Like sales over time, or support requests by country.

They are on the AI bandwagon by the virtue that they have tools that can put together the queries for you, but it's all very boring graph stuff, not a chat-focused tool.