The Telemetry module gathers general information about your use of MethodScript, in order to understand which features are being used, and how you have configured MethodScript. No personal information is ever collected, particularly things like individual values of strings, passwords, your location, specific details in error messages, and other personally identifiable or sensitive information. Your help by allowing anonymous data collection makes a huge difference in the quality of the project, and advocates on your behalf, by ensuring that the dev team sees that you are using specific features, and so changing or removing those features would negatively affect you, so please consider helping us help you by enabling these metrics.

The primary purpose of gathering telemetry is to be able to understand which features you are (or are not) using, so changes and removals of those features will have minimal impact. Additionally, we collect crashdump data when an error is detected in MethodScript itself, so we can automatically see and fix these errors in the future. Error messages themselves are not collected, as these may contain sensitive information, however, things like stacktraces and the type of error may be collected.

What information in particular is collected is completely under your control. First, no data is collected at all unless you have specifically opted in by setting the "telemetry-on" setting to "true" in your preferences.ini file. Secondly, you have fine grained control of what data is collected (or not) by editing this file. New data collection categories may be added in the future, and you can set those to default to "nag" so that you have to specifically opt in to those as well. You can set the telemetry-pref-default-collect setting to false to do so, and you will be given a nag message to check this file to specifically opt in or out to that particular category.

The telemetry data is currently stored in Microsoft Azure's datacenter in Ireland, though this is subject to change without notice (though this header will be updated accordingly). In any case, the data will be treated as if GDPR is applicable to it, whether or not this is legally speaking required, or whatever the local prevailing regulations are, whichever is stricter. This means that you have certain rights in regards to your data. However, since we do not collect personally identifiable data, many of the GDPR requirements do not apply here. In any case, we try to comply with the spirit of the law and do things like requiring specific opt-in before data collection occurs, and ensuring that data is collected in a fair and transparent way. In addition, access to the data, even in aggregate, anonymized form, is only accessible to a limited number of collaborators, who are required to have two factor authentication enabled to see the data. Results of data analysis may be released to the wider community publicly, but only in a way that won't allow reverse engineering of the data. In general, we rely on Microsoft to implement the remaining technical measures to prevent unauthorized access. At any point, if you wish to opt out of this data collection, simply set the telemetry-on setting to "false", and restart the application. Data collection will be disabled, and you will not be asked again. If you are under 16, please do not turn on telemetry logging without your parent or guardian's consent.

Each setting below explains what data is collected. There are two general types of data, metrics, and logs. Metrics are simple data points which happen in an instant, and the fact that the data point was triggered is the complete data. Logs contain additional information associated with the event, such as the Java stacktrace in the case of errors, or the startup mode in the case of startup logs.

Please note that extensions are able to upload additional data, potentially sensitive data, and while the extension authors will not be able to see the data that is uploaded using these mechanisms, you may be subjecting yourself to sensitive data leaks by using them, so ensure that you trust the extension authors as much as you trust us before using them. There are no technical ways for us to prevent a motivated and malicious extension author from bypassing any means we might put in place to prevent this data upload, so there is nothing we can do if you install a malicious extension.

We reserve the right to update this privacy policy without notice, and your continued use of the software constitutes acceptance of the policy contained in the current version of the software, however, we will always use good faith efforts to notify users in public channels when this changes materially.

If you wish to audit the data that is being sent, you may configure the telemetry-audit setting in preferences.ini. If turned on, then the data that would be sent to Azure will instead be printed to stdout, allowing you to validate that no more data than you anticipate is actually being sent, and that the data is being properly anonymized. It's also worth noting that each full startup (that is, a brand new startup of the process) gives you a new session id, so you are not able to be easily tracked between runs.

All of the settings below can have a tri-state value set. The category can be enabled (on/yes/true), disabled (off/no/false) or set to alert you that you have not set a value yet (nag).