FreeCAD News

Chris Hennes devel­oped an opt-in Teleme­try addon to help the devel­op­ment team make good deci­sions and help answer ques­tions like:

• How many peo­ple are affect­ed by a giv­en bug?
• How many peo­ple are run­ning an addon that may be affect­ed by an API change?
• Which plat­forms are the most pop­u­lar and should receive the most devel­op­ment support?
• How many peo­ple are using a spe­cif­ic trans­la­tion and would ben­e­fit from improv­ing it?
• How long should we main­tain sup­port and doc­u­men­ta­tion for old­er releases?
• How can we improve the default user expe­ri­ence based on how users cus­tomize FreeCAD?
• What grant appli­ca­tions should get priority?

To assist with that, the addon trans­mits select infor­ma­tion about your copy of FreeCAD back to a cen­tral server.

The addon recent­ly passed ini­tial beta test­ing. If you are inter­est­ed in help­ing devel­op­ers gain more action­able data, please install it. That’s all you need to do.

FAQ

Is this an opt-in feature?

Yes, you need to man­u­al­ly install the addon via the Addon Man­ag­er. You may need to update the cache in the Addon Man­ag­er first.

Do you have plans to make this an opt-out fea­ture lat­er on?

No, we have no such plans.

What kind of infor­ma­tion does it send?

• FreeCAD pref­er­ences, includ­ing all customizations
• Essen­tial sys­tem infor­ma­tion (plat­form, architecture)
• The list of installed 3^rd-par­ty addons
• Data about incor­rect shut­downs of FreeCAD

Does the addon send any per­son­al information?

No. The addon col­lects only non-iden­ti­fy­ing teleme­try data. Users get assigned ran­dom uni­ver­sal­ly unique iden­ti­fiers (UUIDs).

Can I get a copy of the data that the addon col­lect­ed about my copy of FreeCAD?

Yes. Please fol­low these instruc­tions.

Can I opt out of send­ing teleme­try data?

Yes. Sim­ply unin­stall the addon.

Can I request the removal of data that the addon sent from my computer?

Yes. Please fol­low these instruc­tions.

Is the addon com­pli­ant with the GDPR?

We cur­rent­ly use the PostHog ser­vice, the data is retained in the EU.

How can I make sure that the addon does what you claim it does?

The source code is avail­able for inspec­tion.

Once we col­lect a suf­fi­cient amount of data, we will start pub­lish­ing it open­ly for everyone.

Who is behind this project?

Col­lect­ing use­ful teleme­try data was dis­cussed dur­ing a recent bi-month­ly FreeCAD devel­op­er call. The code was writ­ten by Chris Hennes, one of FreeCAD’s main­tain­ers. The data is col­lect­ed and stew­ard­ed by The FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion AISBL.