Is it unethical to send data to myself once a customer installs my software? [closed]

Question

I'm trying to get an idea of how often my software is being installed. I was thinking about just including a simple URL call in the background the very first time the software is started. I am not trying to gather a lot of information. I really just want to get the date and time the software was installed. Is this unethical or commonly done by other developers?

Answer 1

You could always just have the installer open up a "Thank you for installing our product" page that's hosted on your web server. Since this page would normally only be hit after an install it should give you a decent indicator without being evil.

P.s. Before anyone hounds me on this please note that Firefox does this directly after an install.