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