Thanks for checking out our new tracking feature. We are as concerned about keeping your site safe and private as you are. Here's the skinny on what, why and how.
Why Do You Need to Track Me?
We track information that helps us prepare for releases by testing Business Directory plugin with things you use! Business Directory now has thousands of installed customers and keeping track of what people use and what they don't is getting too hard to do manually. By testing on the most commonly used themes and plugins, we can avoid conflicts prior to release. It also helps us understand how fast you upgrade things–themes, plugins and WordPress core, so we know how fast we need to respond to things and keep up with things that are important to YOU. We don't track personally identifying information or sensitive data like passwords or login credentials of ANY kind.
What Do You Track?
Here's the COMPLETE list of things we are currently tracking:
- General site info:
- Title
- WordPress version
- Business Directory version
- Language
- # of users
- We DO NOT TRACK the site's URL.
- The total payments on your site, payment gateways, and currency codes.
- List of all active plugins, including:
- Plugin name
- Plugin version
- Plugin URI
- Plugin Author and Author URI
- Theme information:
- Name
- URI
- Version
- Author
- Author URI
- Parent theme info (same as above) in case the theme is a child theme
- Post type information:
- Registered public post types (post, page, wpbdp_listing, etc.).
- # of published posts for each post type
- Taxonomies info:
- Taxonomy name
- # of terms in the taxonomy
- Environment/setup info:
- Server OS
- Web Server
- PHP version
- MySQL version
What Don't You Track?
We don't track:
- Passwords
- Login Credentials
- Payment gateway account information
- Any other sensitive data on your server.
In short, if it's not on the list from the previous What Do We Track list, we aren't tracking it. Period.
How Do You Store It?
We periodically run a script that uses a SHA1 hash based on the site's URL to send us the information. This means we can see how a site progresses (or usage changes) without actually seeing the URL, so everything is kept anonymous. The script is small and only runs about 1 time per week to tell us about changes. We store the data in a small database so we can easily query the data to find out what everyone needs us to test on. We store the database securely on a server that is on a security-conscious host.
Are your SURE you can't identify me?
SHA1 hashes are not reversible. There is no known algorithm or script that can decode them back into your site URL. So yes, we're sure. Your data is anonymous and private.