Mahara instances can decide whether they want to register with the Mahara project or not. Currently, the stats that are collected are only visible to the Mahara core project team as we do not ask site admins permission to make them available more widely to the community like for example Moodle: http://moodle.net/stats/
We should be changing that with the next release and ask permission to make certain information available anonymously to the entire community. We shouldn't make all the information available that we collect, but just the most high level ones like
- Geographical location of the registered site
- The site name and URL itself like on http://moodle.net/sites/
- Number of registered users
- Version of Mahara used (unless we decide it's a security risk)
- Number of pages created (could be beneficial to see how active users are on the site; ideally excl. dashboards, profile pages and group homepages)
The information that is shared publicly anonymously with others should be highlighted when you review what information is sent when registering the site.
When we make that change, I think we should reset the registration checkbox for sites that had it set to give them the chance to review the setting and make a conscious decision about registering as it's kinda like accepting new Terms and Conditions.
Since we're also changing the registration data in Bug 1447865, I've filed a separate bug 1450334 to cover asking the admin to re-confirm that they want to send site registration data. So that we can just ask them once, for both of these changes.