Stefan Taxhet's Weblog

Data sent for Online Update Notification

OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. Release Candidates are available for download. Online Update Notification is coming up with this release. Martin showed us the dialogs where the user can influence the behaviour.

There were some concerns about the data OpenOffice.org sends to the update server.
Let me cite from the Online Update Specification (linked from the page with specifications which affect all OpenOffice.org modules):

"StarOffice/OpenOffice.org sends via http post request the following data to the server:

• ProductKey
• Buildid
• ProductPatch
• ProductSource
• AllLanguages
• Operating System
• Platform

The first four items are contained in the version.(ini|rc), ProductKey is contained in the bootstrap.(ini|rc), and operating system and platform are provided by the internal bootstrap variables _OS and _ARCH."

Here is the data as sent by an English OpenOffice.org 2.0 Solaris SPARC version:

ProductKey=OpenOffice.org 2.0
 &buildid=680m181(Build:9057)
 &ProductPatch=
 &ProductSource=SRC680
 &AllLanguages=en-US
 &_OS=Solaris
 &_ARCH=SPARC

There is no personally identifiable information ("Personal Information") sent over the net.

In my opinion this step from the manual to the automatic check for updates (on our way to an automated update) has significant advantages for the user and the project. While I think we should enable this feature by default I agree that we could improve the way it is presented to our users to avoid confusion.

For those connected people that don't want to benefit from the functionality there are three ways to disable it. Let's not trade apprehension of superficial press articles for the ability to improve the product.

Posted at 05:17PM Sep 18, 2006 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  |  Kommentare[1]