In reply to Peter Cralen.

Define "collected". We get all the data we display from the update checks made by WordPress for plugins and themes and core. For example, the "Active Installs" count is simply a count of how many sites checked for an update of that plugin/theme yesterday. Download counts are simply like a naive counter of the downloads of the ZIP files. With some filtering to prevent people from spamming them up by repeatedly requesting the same files over and over, of course. We have Google Analytics on every page of the site, but honestly, that sort of thing is over my head. I never could figure out Google Analytics, personally.

If you want to see what is sent, you can look at the core code. As for what is retained, it's all posted up on w.org somewhere, once we're confident that the results from the counts are reasonably accurate. We don't retain any raw data for more than a couple days, for debugging. Like those download requests. We store the request information for the day, then update the count once a day, then delete the information. Simple as that, really.

What data, exactly, are you concerned about? I find it difficult to imagine what you think we're doing, really, that would be in any way concerning. Dion went to a lot of trouble to make the Active Install counts available, for example. Why is that a bad thing? Why all the fuss? I don't get it, really.