How does the data collection policy comply with GDPR?

Situation

Many users are concerned that making data collection opt-out for users of non-commercial licenses is a direct violation of the EU’s GDPR since consent should be given freely and upfront according to the laws.

Question

How does the new data collection policy comply with GDPR?

Answer

Our approach here reflects the industry practice - being transparent about the options and applying technical measures to protect privacy.

For users of the non-commercial tier, new terms of detailed data collection will be explicitly explained in the Terms of Use and in the IDE by means of an actionable notification, when they are enabling the tier. This tier is created for non-commercial usage only, so it is not expected that companies' proprietary code is to be developed with it. Besides, users can opt out anytime.

In terms of privacy, all analytics data is filtered and minimized (for example, by applying regex and other filters) to reduce risk and avoid processing personal data.

More information on our compliance with data protection laws can be found here: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/settings-usage-statistics.html#data_protection_laws_compliance