How to anonymously and uniquely identify a user of a (paid) plugin?

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Maksim Kolchin
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As I developer of a plugin (it's going to be published on the Marketplace) I want to collect some usage statistics and send it to Mixpanel or somewhere else. To make the usage statistics more insightful, I want to somehow uniquely identify users, so, in an example, I could calculate the number of active users and etc.

Is there an out-of-box way (an existing API) to get an ID of a user which:

  • [must] is the same on the same computer, but it's okay to lose it if the OS configuration is changed,
  • [must] is kept during reinstallation of a plugin,
  • [good to have] is derived from Jetbrains Account, so it could be the same if the user uses the plugin on multiple computers or changed its computer.

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Alexander Bartash
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Hi. You should consider GPDR but I am not qualified to answer this, so I will not be giving advice on how to solve GPDR.

First of all you should at least get user's consent for doing this. Then you can use smth like this but it won't help if users use pirate licenses or share them:

final LicensingFacade instance = LicensingFacade.getInstance();
return null == instance ? null : instance.getLicensedToMessage();

And regarding anonymously you can hash the LicensedTo value and send only the hash.

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Maksim Kolchin
Created

Yes, I remember about GDPR. First of all, I wanted to know technical possibilities and then think about legal implications.

Thank you for the pointer! I've actually started using DeviceIdManager.getOrGenerateId() which helps to meet my first two requirements, but your suggestion meets all of them.

> And regarding anonymously you can hash the LicensedTo value and send only the hash.

Good point!

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