insight Greencloud printer anonymous stats policy

Eco-friendly virtual printer driver to save money, save trees, and exchange your documents with popular cloud storage services
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Fabrice
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insight Greencloud printer anonymous stats policy

Post by Fabrice »

At anytime you can turn off the anonymous stats we are collecting from the setting button on top of the main dialog.
Most of the stats are submitted when you "print" pages -> save to a pdf is a "print" action too.

of course, we don't have any information about your document itself, nor your name, nor your credit card details ;) you can confirm this by any network sniffer :) we just got general usage of the application to improve the product and prioritize the features to improve.

Here is the details of the stats we collect to better serve you

Output kind :

PagesPerSheet : ( value 1,2,4 )
it's the number of pages per face of sheet paper, submitted when you print a job. it allows us to know if the feature is popular or not, visible or not to the users. it's called technically the n-up feature. it could influence us to add more choice ( 8 pages per sheet has been asked by a user )

OutputKind : is the event when you "print" to let us know what you did , physical printing, save as pdf, send by email. if one of these actions is getting popular, we know we need to put more ressources to improve this ( for exemple : if we would see the "send by email" is very popular, we could look to support more email client or even webmail ).
from the total of these events, we know how many session has been completed ( but we don't collect how many times the program has been started by this one )

InputPages :
it's the number of page of the source document if you decide to "print", so if you are using the session ( let open GreenClound and submit another "print" from a 3rd party app, it will submit the total of pages at the time you hit the "print" action buttons.
If you run greencloud but don't print or do any action, we don't keep the information of the number of pages was your document.

SavedPages :
Sent at the same time than InputPages : we collect the number of pages ( sheets of paper ) you won't print. number of sheets of paper saved. it will allow us to know how effective are the different tools provided. A general performance and saving could be computed by this + inputpages combined.

PrinterName :
it's the printer name in the printer list. it is custom name, so you may have changed it ( rename your printer to know the location in your office ), we don't have any way to get the real physical name of the printer. it was attended to list the popularity of the brand of some printers ( HP vs Epson vs Canon ? ) but also the funny part is to see how many people use another pdf creator software while GreenCloud could save to pdf itself.
it's the number of printing job submitted splitting by printers.

Duplex :
return the state of the duplex button, and his value, when you click on print. Could be 3 values, unsupported means the printer can't do 2-side printing, On and Off is the current state of the option ( we don't know if you have changed it or not, if it is the default value ( set by the application install = off ) or your real choice )
as it is session collected, this stat isn't accurate about the exact market share of printers supporting duplex, as 1 person could print a lot and doesn't have the feature, it will bias the stats. the % of people who could print using duplex is the total of ON+OFF ( unsupported needs to be removed from the segment )

InkUsage :
the current value of ink usage when you physically print. values are 100% ( no saving , pure black ) , 75%, 90% , 50%
it's per session too, so 1 user using a high saving option can change the overall usage of the option

PagesSentToCloud :
if you send in the same session to 2 differents cloud service, it will generate 2 events.
we also have the split of the service used ( but not your details of course, it's anonymous counter to know if we should improve dropbox support or Google Docs first )

UpgradeToPro : is sent whatever you reach the limit of 50pages or you click on the link "upgrade to pro", the behaviour will be changed to allow us to know if the limitation is too frequent or if we open the "upgrade to pro" dialog popup as a reminder.

UUID is a unique anonymous number generated to distinct the usage by each user profile : it's sent at launch of the main dialog, it's the pulse of the current of distinct users running the program.


Extra information : it's not a stat itself, but we also check for a newer version on our server by comparing your current version to a file which reports the latest "stable" version on our server. it happens at most 1 time per day.

The 50 pages limitation means we are just importing the 50 first page of the source document even if the pages are processed by the core driver.