1. What is telemetry of software?
- From Wikipedia: In software, telemetry is used to gather data on the use and performance of applications and application components, e.g. how often certain features are used, measurements of start-up time and processing time, hardware, application crashes, and general usage statistics and/or user behavior.
- Microsoft uses this technique, e.g. :
- Google uses this technique, e.g. :
- Red Hat uses this technique, e.g. :
- CockroachDB also uses this technique, e.g. :
- There are many other well-known companies/software in the world that also use telemetry to help improve user experience and improve products.
- In order to better serve our users, PingCAP also uses telemetry.
2. What we have done before with telemetry
- To improve our products and customers’ experience, a set of telemetry data might be collected. The items of data, its processing and usage, as well as its storage, etc, are all provided by PingCAP Privacy Policy as well as the product document of TiDB. PingCAP Privacy Policy was published on the official website of PingCAP: https://www.pingcap.com. It is in line with industry practice and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations. For the full context of PingCAP Privacy Policy, please click the following url link: https://www.pingcap.com/privacy-policy/.
- If community users don’t want PingCAP to collect the aforementioned data, they can turn off telemetry features easily. The turning off steps were clearly stated in PingCAP Privacy Policy.
- Anyone who downloads TiDB from PingCAP official website should accept and abide by PingCAP Privacy Policy.
3. What feedback we got from our customers
- Before February 20, 2023, if a user deployed the community version of TiDB, telemetry feature was turned on by default. It could be turned off by the user any time. And PingCAP Privacy Policy applies. When a customer approached us in querying telemetry functions, we noticed that some users might neglect PingCAP Privacy Policy when they were downloading TiDB community version. To protect the users’ data to a higher level, we decided to turn off telemetry features by default from February 20, 2023. We believe it’s in our users’ best interest.
- If you want to help us to improve TiDB, you could turn on the telemetry feature manually.
4. What changes are we going to make in the near future
- All the products from PingCAP will switch telemetry off with default implementation and configuration. This work will be finished on February 20, 2023.
- Because of the change, we will update the PingCAP Privacy Policy accordingly, add notice to all users who download TiDB from our official website and other official channels. Please find the url as follows: https://www.pingcap.com/download/.
Conclusion
All feedback and suggestions from TiDB users are valuable to us. We will consistently improve our products and provide our users with the most secure and advanced features of TiDB.