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Great question. We're in the midst of updating our privacy policy, but I'll give a full explanation here.

It may be useful to differentiate between what data we collect and what data we don't collect in order to clear up any confusion.

1. What we collect

We collect a variety of usage analytics that help us understand how you use Kite and how we can improve the product. These include:

* Which editors you are using Kite with

* Number of requests that the Kite Engine has handled for you

* How often you use specific Kite features e.g. how many completions from Kite did you use

* Size (in number of files) of codebases that you work with

* Names of 3rd party Python packages that you use

* Kite application resource usage (CPU and RAM)

You can opt-out of sending these analytics by changing a Kite setting (https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics).

Additionally, we collect anonymized "heartbeats" that are used to make sure the Kite app is functioning properly and not crashing unexpectedly. These analytics are just simple pings with no metadata, and as mentioned, they're anonymized so that there's no way for us to trace which users they came from.

We also use third party libraries (Rollbar and Crashlytics) to report errors or bugs that occur during the usage of the product.

2. What we don't collect

* Contents (partial or full) of any source code file that resides on your hard drive

* Information (i.e. file paths) about your file system hierarchy

* Any indices of your code produced by the Kite Engine to power our features - these all stay local to your hard drive



How do you guys plan on monetizing this? This list of analytics seems fine at a quick glance, but I'm concerned that there's not a transparent path to profitability here.

Just like any other service, there's no guarantee that you won't start collecting snippets of source code or other metadata to start selling once the VC's start applying pressure to generate income. What's your strategy?


> You can opt-out of sending these analytics by changing a Kite setting (https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics).

Shouldn't this be opt-in according to GDPR?

> * Line-of-Code Completions - Kite's completions engine can now predict several tokens of code at a time, powered by the most sophisticated AI code models available.

Won't this result into copy-paste-like functionality of StackOverflow? This seems great for small projects, but doesn't look useful at for anything else it seems. I'm skeptical that Kite provides anything of value compared to all of the other tools I have.

The website has mentioned that other languages "are coming soon", though it has said this since the last Kite scandal. Are these just empty words?


> Shouldn't this be opt-in according to GDPR?

No, because it isn't personal data.


But cookies that save your search queries are personal data and require opt-in? You can consider anything not to be "personal data". I still really want this to be opt-in, not opt-out.




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