Spies on you – beware

  • This was a good plugin, but unfortunately the author has opted to include the spying software Freemius, which tracks your site and users. I can not recommend this plugin anymore until it is removed.

    PS. Yes the spying is opt-in, but shows blatant disregard for privacy from the author. Pick a better plugin, for example Stream.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author ArielK

    (@arielk-1)

    I apologise for the feelings that were stirred in you from our last version, but we have *zero* intention to “spy” after anyone.

    We added an option only to those who are interested in sharing with us some statistical information regarding their website. You do not have to share any of the information if you do not want to.

    What is the purpose?

    Our aim is to better our plugin in many aspects and we wanted to receive some insights from our users. As of right now we do not know who is using this plugin.

    What information is being sent to us?

    The WordPress language, Version WordPress and PHP is being used, your email which you need to verify, and that’s it.

    Again my apologies for any uncomfortable feelings. I hope you decide to reuse our plugin as soon as possible.

    Hi Stanislav and thanks for your feedback. My name is Vova and I’m the lead dev of Freemius Insights.

    As you mentioned, Freemius is an opt-in only, NO data is captured unless the user explicitly approve it. So if you are not comfortable with sharing data, simply click skip.

    In addition, it only tracks very basic info about the plugin usage, the site and the user that opted-in (not other users in the system).

    The goal of the platform is to provide developers an analytics tool to improve the plugin’s UX and make it better. Learn the weaknesses of the plugin and why people uninstall it, to fix those flaws.

    The Pojo team developed an amazing and absolutely free plugin as a contribution to the open-source community. So there’s no commercial incentive adding Freemius Insights at all. In the end of the day, it’s for the benefit of the users.

    With regards to the opt-in, we strictly follow the www.ads-software.com guidelines and made sure to explicitly mention everything that being captured. Having said that, we are always open to feedback from users to build a better solution – how would you make it better from a user perspective?

    Thread Starter Stanislav Khromov

    (@khromov)

    vova,

    An improvement would be to make Freemius a separate plugin on the WPorg repository – that way there would not be any old versions of the code (possibly exploitable) lying around in plugins, and everyone could be free to decide whether they want that code in their installations or not.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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