What information will be tracked by opting into usage tracking?
Easy Digital Downloads is a leading eCommerce solution for WordPress and strive to offer a best-in-class plugin that makes it effortless to run your business.
One of the tools we use to better understand the needs of our users is usage tracking. If you are using the Free version of Easy Digital Downloads, you can help us by navigating to Downloads -> Settings -> Misc in your WordPress dashboard, you can opt into usage tracking by selecting the Yes, I want to help! setting found under the Join the EDD Community section.
Below, you will find a description of what information will be tracked once you have saved this setting.
Is my data Private?
Yes! Our mission is not to know data about any one specific site, but to have a better understanding of how you use Easy Digital Downloads, as a community. This allows us to make data-driven decisions about what features to build, remove, or spend time improving to ensure that we provide the most value we possibly can.
In the most recent changes to our Usage Tracking, we’ve completely stripped out any data that we could identify as personally identifiable. This includes any text fields, text areas, URLs, etc. We don’t even include the URL of the site in the data. Upon the first check-in, we generate a unique hashed string that is salted with data from your site that we do not know. We’ve also modified the headers that are sent with the WordPress HTTP API so that your URL is not included in the User Agent string that is sent by default.
Furthermore, we’ve configured the server that the data is sent to in a way that it does not store access logs, so that the IP Address of your site is not connected to your site’s unique ID.
WordPress
- Active Theme/Plugins: With there being so many Plugins and Themes out there, this information lets us make sure more heavily used themes and plugins are given extra attention during testing and work seamlessly with each update to Easy Digital Downloads.
- Locale: We want Easy Digital Downloads to be accessible to everyone, and knowing the site’s locale helps us focus our translation efforts.
- Timezone: We have users across the globe, so knowing the densities within various time zones helps us provide the best support coverage possible.
- SSL Enabled: An SSL Certificate is essential to an ecommerce site, knowing how many sites haven’t made the jump assists with our testing.
- Multisite: If a site is a multisite network, knowing the sub-site count helps us ensure Easy Digital Downloads scales properly for large networks.
- Version: Knowing what WordPress Versions are being used with Easy Digital Downloads helps us better understand what features in WordPress we can take advantage of as new features are released.
Easy Digital Downloads
- Key Dates: Knowing when a user first started using Easy Digital Downloads assists with knowing how easy Easy Digital Downloads is to get up and running.
- Aggregated Store Stats: Sites of all sizes, ranging from small to very large, enjoy Easy Digital Downloads. Stats related to orders, the gateways that are used, how frequently they process refunds and similar data help us make sure our features and updates get tested in situations that closely match our customers’ site environments and Easy Digital Downloads usage. That way we can be sure those additions will work great for everyone. Don’t worry though, again, we intentionally built this in a way that does not send identifying information.
- Plugin Settings: As we strive to add features, this allows us to determine which new settings or areas are getting used most frequently (as well as which settings are not used much). Please note that all sensitive settings such as API keys, email address, or other text fields that may included personal information are automatically excluded from tracking, and are not sent to the server.
- Active Integrations: With our growing library of integrations, knowing the popularity of each one helps us determine where resources should be allocated.
Web Server
- PHP and MySQL Versions: These details help us make sure our testing procedures have proper coverage to avoid compatibility issues.
- Server Software: This reports if the web server software is Apache, Nginx, or similar, which is used for testing purposes.
When do we collect data?
When you initially opt-in to help us out, we’ll send the first set of data as soon as possible. We will then schedule a background task to send this once a week. We’ll also send it as soon as EDD runs an upgrade as well.