It seems there is a new fad in Open Source Software development where authors of Plugins have begun gathering statistics about websites that use their software.

Most of the products showing this feature include freeware but there are a number of coders that want to make some cash off their hard work and registration or stat gathering is one way they know who where when of sites that use their plugins.

Harvesting of information including the registered email, IP , Site Name and domain along with real time stats for every instance of the plugin being run. Meaning they know where your site is and what your visitor stats are.

Some authors just want their users to register and require your email.

Others are going a little too far it seems.

Site statistics are both private and internal information that no professional website owner wants to give away. These statistics can be used for marketing of advertising and they are never disclosed anonymously.

So, What will happen with this new fad?

Hopefully it will end or be monitored by the core software designers.

More importantly since WordPress has moved to internal automatic updates some of this software could be installed without prior notice.

This would be an atrocious breach of confidence between users and developers and it could mean problems down the road.

So Keep Your Eyes open because someone may be watching your site from the inside.