The WordPress Plugin Review Team is currently considering restrictions on plugins from automatically installing additional plugins when setting up a plugin. A couple of the major offenders, when it comes to doing that, have chimed in. Unsurprisingly, they are suggesting not stopping that from happening. One of those was the CEO of the not so awesome Awesome Motive. Their automatic installation of additional plugins causes problems for users of Awesome Motive plugins, as well as introducing additional security risk to the websites, as their plugins have had plenty of security vulnerabilities over the years. While looking in to how those players are currently handling that automatic installation, we noticed that a couple of multi-million installs plugins from them are tracking usage without users choosing to opt in, and in the case Awesome Motive’s 3+ Million Install All in One SEO, without disclosing that usage tracking is being enabled.
Here is how the guidelines for the Plugin Directory explain how usage tracking should be handled: [Read more]