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How to prevent outgoing connection?

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2013 11:20 am
by pstein
When I start Oxygen then my firewalls pop up indicating an outgoing connecting from Oxygen (to its home server?).

Even if I disable auto-update check in preferences-->Global
there is an outgoing Internet connect attempt.

This is annoying and a security risk.
Does Oxygen transfer any personal data to the home server?

How can I disable this permanently?

Peter

Re: How to prevent outgoing connection?

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2013 2:18 pm
by adrian
Hi,

No personal data has ever been collected or sent by Oxygen.

When checking for a new version at application startup, Oxygen sends the following information (as URI parameters in an HTTP request):
- Oxygen version
- Oxygen edition (Academic, Professional, Enterprise)
- Java version
- platform/OS
In response it obtains the latest version and maintenance build information from our website.
This stops if you disable the option Automatic Version Checking from Options > Preferences, Global. You can still manually check for a new version from the menu: Help > Check for a New Version (the same information is sent when you do).

In addition, the welcome screen in v15.x and later retrieves a couple of URLs and some images referred in them at the application startup (can be disabled):
http://www.oxygenxml.com/ws_videos.xml
http://www.oxygenxml.com/ws_events.xml

To completely get rid of the welcome screen you have to do two things:
- disable the Show welcome at startup checkbox from the dialog (Help > Welcome).
- close all editors (File > Close All) and then press the "Close" button from the Welcome screen panel pinned as editor background.

A feature that can send information to us (to our technical support channels) by user intervention is the Report Problem dialog. This dialog is triggered when Oxygen encounters an unhandled error or a crash. It's also available in the main menu Help > Report Problem. The user has the option to include/omit various information in the error report and submit it or simply discard it. Nothing is sent without the user pressing the Submit button.


Older versions of Oxygen (v14.2 and older) had an Improvement Program component that collected with the user permission application usage data (what operations were used and how many times, etc). No personal information/data was collected or sent. This has been completely removed in v15 and later.


If you want nothing to do with any of these information exchanges, you can disable them at installation time (Windows/Linux) in the last screen (Finish) of the installation wizard. Press the Privacy Options hyperlink.


Please note that depending on the documents you work with and the references found in them (schemas, images, etc), Oxygen will create connections to retrieve the resources referred by these documents.

Regards,
Adrian