At Anaconda, we continually strive to improve the user experience for our community and customers. To serve our community better, we’re introducing a new usage insights conda plugin for Anaconda Distribution and Miniconda. This update is designed to help us understand how Anaconda users interact with conda environments and packages, enabling us to enhance the tools and resources you rely on every day.
This conda plugin will allow us to:
- Ensure the most-needed packages are always available.
- Optimize resource allocation to prioritize building and testing the packages that are most important to users.
- Identify trends to deliver a smoother, more efficient experience.
We’re committed to transparency and user choice, so this feature is opt-out friendly and designed with your privacy in mind.
In this blog post, we’ll explore what data is collected, how it benefits you, and how you can manage your data preferences.
What Data is Being Collected?
The new plugin collects anonymized data, using the existing Anaconda anon-usage token, about specific commands used in the conda environment, including:
- Installed packages: What packages are being installed or updated, including which are dependencies, and the specific versions of each package
- Searches: What packages users are searching for and whether or not they exist in Anaconda channels
Crucially, no personally identifiable information is collected and this plugin is not designed to monitor Terms of Service compliance. Users are identified only through random, anonymous tokens, ensuring your privacy. You can read more about these anonymous tokens.
Why Collect This Data?
Enhanced usage data helps Anaconda better serve both free and paid users by:
- Improving Package Availability: By understanding what users need, we can prioritize building or optimizing popular packages and dependencies.
- Filling Ecosystem Gaps: Search data highlights unmet needs in the package library, guiding future offerings.
- Boosting Performance: Analyzing package co-installation patterns improves testing and build efficiency.
- Enhancing Community Support: Sharing aggregate insights with developers and contributors to improve package quality.
- Delivering Customer Value: Helping commercial users optimize their usage patterns.
For example, this data will allow us to detect popular but unavailable packages, and prioritize their inclusion. These benefits extend to our community as well, through initiatives like better-informed package stats and insights for channel owners and developers. Also, as a conda plugin, other projects in the larger conda ecosystem will be able to implement their own telemetry efforts by reusing this work.
Where and When Is This Happening?
This plugin will be included in the following Anaconda product updates:
- Miniconda Release 24.11.1
- Anaconda Distribution Release 2025.02
The source code repository will also be openly available in January.
Opting Out
We respect your choice to manage your data preferences. If you wish to disable this feature, you can do so by either editing your .condarc file or removing the package from your base environment. Follow the instructions in the documentation.
Looking Ahead
We are committed to using this data to deliver meaningful improvements for both our community and customers. As always, privacy and transparency guide our decisions, and we’re grateful for your trust.
Stay tuned for updates as we roll out this new capability, including planned expansions to capture more information about conda environments.
