All,
I wanted to make everyone aware that a UUID
has been added to the Eclipse Platform [1] and is available in
the current Neon RC. This was done at the request of the
Eclipse Foundation.
The UUID is automatically generated and
stored in the ${user.home}/.eclipse/eclipse.uuid file. The
UUID does not contain any personally identifiable information.
If a user do not want to have this property set they are
instructed to set eclipse.uuid=0. Information about the UUID
has been included in the Eclipse Platform N&N [2].
The UUID will be automatically added to the
user-agent of http requests to *.eclipse.org servers. For
Neon, the projects that make these types of requests include
p2 [1], MPC [3] and AERI [4]. I would expect other projects
will add a uuid in the future.
The immediate questions for many people are
1) why are we doing this, and 2) what about the privacy
concerns. Let me attempt to answer both of these questions.
Why are we doing this?
The Eclipse Foundation has started an
program to better understand our user community. We are using
a log file analysis service, Splunk, to analyze many of our
log files to get a better idea of how people are using
Eclipse. For instance, how many people actively use Eclipse,
what version of Java is the most popular with the Eclipse user
community, what version of Eclipse Platform is being used or
what operating system is being used? In the past, this type of
information was typically a ‘best guess’. We believe can do
better by having the actual data of our user community. The
UUID will allow us to get a more accurate answer to many of
these questions.
What about the privacy concerns?
The UUID is anonymous and does not contain
personably identifiable information. We only intend to use and
analyze the UUID at an aggregate level. A user is able to
opt-out of sending a UUID by setting eclipse.uuid=0. The
Eclipse Foundation has a published Privacy Policy [5] that
details our specific practices.
Please let me know if you have any
questions or concerns. I appreciate this might be a sensitive
topic but I do believe it is the right thing to do for the
Eclipse community.
Regards
Ian
[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=490112
[2] https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.6/platform.php
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=492916
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=492917
[4] https://eclipse.org/legal/privacy.php