Several extension developers asked about and toying with the idea of starting to collect software usage data. I completely agree that such data can be useful for prioritizing developments and can be a good motivator for developers to devote more of their time to a project. However, I also see a huge…

Hi @Bob5 thanks for the feedback: [image] Bob5: It can be beneficial or dangerous for end user and even for project. Can you help describe in specifics the types of dangers that you are most concerned about? That will help guide the progress on this topic. Thanks!

Like … Spying on users? How could it be bad? I have no idea. For projects like audacity (audio editor) - it had to drop the idea of telemetry but still have a bad PR to this day. But it was big project with lots of people using it, and after announcing telemetry to improve this program - it headed …

“Spying” sounds bad. But would you call data collection spying if it is all done with the explicit consent and full understanding of the user?

From legal point of view - NO ! From practical point of view - YES of course ! Nobody really reads that stuff, and this fact can be used against user. Its user fault - but still can be used against user (that can assume that nobody will abuse him). Does program provide a clear and easy way to vi…

These specifics are very useful. We can very easily implement telemetry so that we can answer Yes to all these 3 questions. Is there any information that you would be comfortable with sharing and any specific data that you would not want to share? (number of times Slicer is started, specific module…

I think its OK, anything above that can be considered “fingerprinting” like kernel compilation, more specyfic hardware details etc. and even more - like accesing files and usage of fule etc. is in my opinion not apropriate. Thank You :slight_smile:

[image] Bob5: more specyfic hardware details etc Do you find the hardware details that Steam collects to be acceptable? https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

[image] lassoan: Set up an nginx the server (based on Kitware’s recommendation) that returns success (200 OK) and an empty page whenever it receives a valid web request and it logs the request into a file. You can run a simple flask application to check the validity of the request (similar to t…

A pull request has been submitted that proposes to add qSlicerCoreApplication::logUsageEvent(QString component, QString event) method, which can be called by modules in Slicer core and extensions to indicate that certain software feature is used. The application itself does not process the event, ju…

Should we start collecting software usage data?

Development

jcfr (Jean Christophe Fillion Robin) June 11, 2024, 6:56pm 74

Following up this morning weekly hangout, sources of the website that will be used to visualize the 3D Slicer application and extensions usage statistics will be organized in the following GitHub repository.

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Add number of extension installations to extension manager Feature requests	21	684	July 23, 2021
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2023.10.31 Weekly Meeting Weekly meetings	1	245	October 30, 2023

Should we start collecting software usage data?

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