When installing the latest intellij, I was reading the privacy policy and came across this:
We use third party service providers as discussed in this section. We also use third party service providers in other circumstances; a complete list of the reasons in which we use third party service providers can be found here.
The word "here" links to this page, which as of this writing contains only a list of links to other privacy policies, and NO information about how these 3rd parties are used or what data is shared with them (despite the text in the policy itself claiming the page contains this information).
Does anyone know HOW and WHEN the following services (copied from the above wiki page in case it changes) are used by Intellij?
The survey ones are fairly obvious what's probably going on, but what data, is shared and under what circumstances with some of the others could be important. In some cases folks might be working on projects meant to be kept secret, or might have personal or ethical reasons to avoid having a presence on some of those services. Without knowledge of which features send data to these providers, and what data is sent it's hard to agree to the policy.
One might also argue that the failure to specify as claimed in the policy means they don't get to send any data, but nobody wants to bother with that legal mess... particularly since they could change their wiki after the fact, and then one has to prove what it said at the time etc. The alternate argument is that the lack of specification implies they might share any and all data...
Does anyone know of better information about how Intellij uses these providers? Googling just got me lots of links on how to install Facebook SDK etc...
The privacy policy page shows links to the privacy policies of services used by the JetBrains Web site, marketing activities etc. As of version 2016.2 and all earlier versions, IntelliJ IDEA does not connect to any of those services, or send any data to them, from the product itself. I (a member of the JetBrains management team) am also not aware of any plans to start doing so in the future.
(Note that third-party plugins not developed by JetBrains do sometimes use those services.)