Send Bug and Usage Reports

Starting WhatPulse version 4.0, the client can automatically collect and send us data about bugs and usage. This information is important to us for improving the user experience and helps us prioritize features and bug fixes. This article explains exactly what we collect and how it's sent to us. This article complements our Privacy Policy.

Settings

Both the bug reports and usage data collection is controlled by the setting called Send bug and usage reports. You can find this on the Settings tab and General section. When you disable this option, the client stops collecting and sending data. The setting Work offline will also prevent the client from sending data.

Usage Data

It's important for us to know which features of the client are being used, and which are not. For this purpose, the client collects page views, the time spent on pages, and button clicks. This data is first stored locally in the client database and sent to the website (client.whatpulse.org) every 4 hours. The website then transforms the data into data that Google Analytics (GA) can understand and sends it to that service.

We periodically check the usage data to see how the client is being used and which features are the most (and least) popular. Then we adjust our roadmap accordingly. Here are screenshots of the GA reports that we use:

Anonymization

Because the client sends the data to the website and the website then sends it to GA, Google itself does not know about any account information, nor can it relate the data to a person. During the data transformation process, incoming data is not stored on our website for processing but gets transformed and sent in-flight. No user ID, computer ID, or IP address is sent to Google Analytics. We use a custom generated UUID per computer that is not stored on our website and only your local client knows about. This UUID is generated when you install the client.

All this means that we, nor Google, can trace usage data to an individual. Here's an example of what a "user" looks like in GA:

Bug Reports

We want to know when there's a bug so that we can fix it. When the setting Send bug and usage reports is enabled, the client captures information about critical errors and sends them to our website. We use a self-hosted Sentry instance to receive and process these bug reports. There is no user information attached to these reports, only which operating system (and its version) the bug was captured on. Here's an example of a bug report: