Feedback survey mail from Appwrite

[srvmonkey]

Hello,

I am using your docker compose to self-host Appwrite during the development of an app. I just received an email from the sender '"Aditya Oberai" <community=[email protected]>' with the following content:

Hello Appwriter!

We are surveying developers, who actively use Appwrite, about our brand. And we would love to see you participate and share your opinion and feedback.

• This survey should take around 5-10 minutes.
• Rest assured that your responses will be kept confidential.
• Don’t hesitate to be transparent, give us your unsalted opinion.

Your participation is invaluable to us and will greatly influence our future brand development. Thank you in advance and we look forward to seeing your feedback.

Fill Out Survey
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Appwrite, HaSheizaf St 4, Ra'anana, Ra'anana 4366411, Israel

Unsubscribe
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My question is: Is this a legit feedback campaign from you? Does Appwrite send email addresses (or any other information) entered in self-hosted instances to some backend on your side?

Regards

[joeyouss]

Hi,
Yes, this is an email from our side. More about this can be commented on by @adityaoberai

[eldadfux]

Hey, this is a legit survey sent by our team to collect feedback, we would try and work out to make sure it is more clear next time. Thank you for your feedback.

We do collect some information from the console to measure usage and improve the product. We allow to opt out by using a DNT (do not track headers) headers. Our team is also planing to work on a new environment variable to allow disabling usage stats.

[srvmonkey]

Thanks for your reply.

I guess this should rather be an opt-in feature, and should be mentioned in the documentation somewhere listing the exact data that is collected. This rather intransparent collection of e-mail addresses just destroyed the really good first impression I had of Appwrite. Silently collecting data is something I usually just know from shady giants like Google, Facebook, Xiaomi etc. In my opinion, the reason for choosing self-hosted open source in the first place is to get rid of this kind of behavior.

A better option might be to just track the visitors on your website or documentation pages, and if it is a recurring user, display an undisturbing popup asking for his feedback. No need to leech email addresses from random people's backends. I know you are working on a cloud solution, and I am sure there you can collect more than enough data and easily ask for feedback.

Would it be possible for you to add a documentation page listing the data you collect and what outbound connections are made?

[eldadfux]

@srvmonkey for sure, I appreciate this feedback. We can understand the frustration. I'll talk with the team and will make sure we act more transparently on how we collect stats from the console. For now you can find more information about how we collect data in the privacy policy you have when signing into the console: https://appwrite.io/policy/privacy It's also important for me to emphasize we only track the way people interact with the UI and we do not fetch any project data at all, but again we will work to make this more clear.

We always try to strike the best balance between running a business to support our work, making the product better and avoiding anything that might compromise this trust and from learning your comment we can definitely do better.

Right now, our plans are as follow:

• Add proper note in the docs
• Push the new env variable to disable console stats being reported to us, add detailed documentation for it.
• See if we can add a built in opt-in process where we can measure stat so we know how many people opted in vs out so we can estimate total usage from the sampling we will get. This should make things much clearer.

Again thanks for the feedback, feel free to share any more thoughts.

[srvmonkey]

will make sure we act more transparently on how we collect stats from the console

Sounds good 👍

information about how we collect data in the privacy policy

Have not thought about reading that yet. Thank you.

we only track the way people interact with the UI and we do not fetch any project data at all

Not really accurate. E-mail address and name is not needed for tracking the interaction. You could combine those two strings and hash it before sending it to your server. Should be enough uniqueness.

We always try to strike the best balance between running a business to support our work

For sure, I understand. Marketing and contact to the customer/user is key to success.

variable to disable console stats being reported to us

This option should definitely exist, that's true. But for enabled analytics, as I said above, maybe think about collecting the usage in an anonymized way. You could easily mention this in the docs about analytics right at the top. Something like this: "In the open source version, we collect anonymized data, no email addresses or usernames".

[joeyouss]

Closing this in favor of #2772

Please feel free to comment there if in case you have any queries : )