Privacy and telemetry

FDDB Exporter does not collect personal data. Your diary stays in your own MongoDB / InfluxDB, and your FDDB credentials are only used to log in to FDDB.info and fetch that data.

To get a rough idea of how the tool is used — and therefore how much it is worth maintaining — the application sends a small anonymous ping. It is sent once on startup and once a day (fddb-exporter.telemetry.cron, 4 AM by default).

What is sent

Field	Example	Meaning
mailHash	973dfe463ec857…	SHA-256 hash of your FDDB username, used only to count installs
documentCount	1245	Number of documents in MongoDB (omitted if MongoDB is disabled)
pointCount	1245	Number of points in InfluxDB (omitted if InfluxDB is disabled)
mongodbEnabled / influxdbEnabled	true / false	Which persistence layers are in use
mcpEnabled	false	Whether the MCP server is enabled
mcpWriteToolsEnabled	false	Whether the MCP export (write) tools are enabled
executionMode	CONTAINER	JAR, CONTAINER or KUBERNETES
appVersion	2.4.1	The version you are running

The mail hash is one-way and cannot be turned back into your address. It exists purely so that repeated pings from the same installation are not counted as new users.

Turning it off

There is currently no enabled flag for telemetry — the ping is registered unconditionally, so it cannot be switched off in the configuration. I really want to know how many people are using the tool, so I ask you to leave it on. If this is a dealbreaker for you, you can still stop the ping in two ways:

• Point it somewhere harmless. FDDB-EXPORTER_TELEMETRY_URL is a normal configuration property. Set it to an address that goes nowhere and the send fails, which costs one log line a day and nothing else — the application does not care whether the ping succeeded.

  docker run -e 'FDDB-EXPORTER_TELEMETRY_URL=http://localhost:1' ghcr.io/itobey/fddb-exporter

• Block it at the network level. telemetry.itobey.dev in your DNS sinkhole, or an egress rule that only lets the container reach fddb.info and your databases. Same outcome, enforced outside the application.

Outbound requests, in full

Three hosts, and nothing else:

Host	Why	When
fddb.info	Logging in and scraping your diary — the entire point of the application	On every export
telemetry.itobey.dev	The anonymous ping described above	Startup, then daily
api.github.com	Checking whether a newer release exists, so the UI can tell you	Startup, then daily

The version check reads the public latest release endpoint of this repository. It sends no data about you — it is an unauthenticated GET, and GitHub sees only that some installation asked. It shares FDDB-EXPORTER_TELEMETRY_CRON with the ping. Blocking it costs you the update notice in the Web UI and nothing else.

The MCP flags

mcpEnabled and mcpWriteToolsEnabled are the two on/off switches described under MCP Server configuration — nothing more. They tell me how many people actually turn the MCP server on and how many go the extra step of allowing it to write, which is what decides how much of my time goes into that part of the project.

No diary content, product names, questions, prompts, tool names or tool calls are sent. mcpWriteToolsEnabled is reported as false whenever the MCP server itself is off, since the flag has no effect in that case.

Auditing it

The whole thing is about eighty lines and lives in TelemetryService and TelemetryDto. If you still have concerns, open an issue or get in touch.