What I'd like permission to collect, and why:
—First, a little bit of philosophy:

I am completely committed to my own personal privacy, and I honestly value yours every bit as much. However, I am also absolutely committed to making FMPerception as good as I possibly can, and a little bit of data can go a long way. If there was any way around collecting this data while maintaining the quality of FMPerception, I would.

If the concept of giving any of this data to me creeps you out, or violates corporate policy, turn it off. Please. I'll completely understand. I'm honestly embarrassed to ask in the first place.

If you can stand the data collection, I promise to only use it to make FMPerception better. It won't be used to market to you, email you, bother you, target you, or otherwise annoy you. It is all anonymized, so I can't use it to interact with you personally at all.


—Share anonymized crash metadata when FMPerception crashes:

When you bump into a problem, you don't always have time to file a bug report, and I completely understand. However, I take crashes very seriously. If you check this box, FMPerception will drop me a quick message every time it crashes. I won't know anything about you, your clients, or what you were working on. The crashlog is the functional equivalent of FileMaker saying "hey, I crashed in this script on this line of code." Just imagine how awesome that would be if you could get that information from your users without forcing them to do anything. Well... FMPerception can. I won't hold a grudge (or even be notified) if you turn this off. But if you turn it off, and you have a crash, well, I didn't hear about it.

One final note on crash reporting. Because the data is anonymized, there is absolutely no way for me to contact you to ask questions about what happened. If you have additional information about what you were doing at the time that might be helpful in chasing down the issue, please consider filing a bug report. I don't have to tell you the value of a detailed bug report.

On OS X I'm using Crashlytics for crash reporting.


—Share anonymized machine metadata when FMPerception updates:

When you update to a new version, I'd like to get a little bit of anonymized information about what kind of computer you're using. How fast is your computer? What version of OS X are you running? How much RAM do you have? What language does your computer use? Now, I can't tie any of this to you directly, but this data will really help me make this a better app for you. Do we have a bunch of users with very little RAM? I should work on reducing the memory footprint of the app. What language should we localize into first? What percentage of FMPerception users are still using Yosemite (which could be important to both you and I in a year or so)? Again, there'll be no hard feelings if you turn this off. I won't even know. But that also means that your personal needs may not be represented when I'm making decisions about what to do with the next version, or with new features. I'll have difficulty making sure that FMPerception has been tested with an environment like yours.

On OS X I'm using Sparkle for automatic updates and metadata gathering during update. NOTE: The metadata that we gather on update is collected at geistinteractive.com, and never touches anyone else's server.