Neo4J Community Edition Calling Home?

Question

while working on our Neo4J graph application And setting debug logging for the root logger I came across the following statistics like message:

[DEBUG] HttpURLConnection: sun.net.www.MessageHeader@537f294a7 pairs: {GET /?totalmem=12758278144+propids=0+os.arch=amd64+edition=community+dist=unknown+source=maven+numprocs=4+mac=005056c00008+revision=2.1.5:2.1-maint:529/45c3cc04946c2b0e243e48c8252e40cb85931744+tags=spring,sdn,web+os.version=6.3+reg=unreg+relids=0+v=2.1.5+heapsize=47775896+os.name=Windows_8.1+id=641ca9a78ddc53ae+labelids=3+nodeids=0+p=-1 HTTP/1.1: null}{Cache-Control: no-cache}{Pragma: no-cache}{User-Agent: Java/1.8.0_51}{Host: 52.0.233.188}{Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2}{Connection: keep-alive}
[DEBUG] HttpURLConnection: sun.net.www.MessageHeader@167dbd419 pairs: {null: HTTP/1.1 200 OK}{Server: nginx/1.6.2}{Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 10:05:40 GMT}{Content-Type: text/html}{Content-Length: 164}{Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Jun 2012 09:48:29 GMT}{Connection: keep-alive}{ETag: "4fc88fed-a4"}{Accept-Ranges: bytes}

I'm more than a little surprised because I haven't configured anything in Neo4j that tells it to share my machine configuration with some web server on the internets.

By the way, I know it is neo4j due to the version number (2.1.5) and community edition keywords, and the ip number 52.0.233.188 which resolves to an amazon aws dns entry but identifies itself as udc.neo4j.org.

Answer 1

I've discovered that this is a by-default-on Usage Data Collector service that Neo4j documents here: http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/usage-data-collector.html

It contains details about how to disable it also.. Having said that, I really don't like this kind of stuff getting more and more prevalent in software nowadays.

UPDATE 1: I've tried to disable the udc by following the steps described (http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/usage-data-collector.html#_how_to_disable_udc), but the UDC is still contacted. This is running from my Eclipse IDE, haven't tested yet with packaged fat jar:

[DEBUG] HttpURLConnection: sun.net.www.MessageHeader@32bc2cb97 pairs: {GET /?totalmem=42932072448+propids=1323+os.arch=amd64+edition=community+dist=unknown+source=maven+numprocs=24+mac=005056c00008+revision=2.1.8:2.1-maint:687/5c83ce3a5ddf33259593f719153ce71a6fe89fc7+tags=spring,sdn,web+os.version=6.3+reg=unreg+relids=810+v=2.1.8+heapsize=156271600+os.name=Windows_8.1+id=b599d44d76a45a87+labelids=10+nodeids=409+p=-1 HTTP/1.1: null}{Cache-Control: no-cache}{Pragma: no-cache}{User-Agent: Java/1.8.0_51}{Host: 52.0.233.188}{Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2}{Connection: keep-alive}
[DEBUG] HttpURLConnection: sun.net.www.MessageHeader@77bea48a9 pairs: {null: HTTP/1.1 200 OK}{Server: nginx/1.6.2}{Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 11:05:30 GMT}{Content-Type: text/html}{Content-Length: 164}{Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Jun 2012 09:48:29 GMT}{Connection: keep-alive}{ETag: "4fc88fed-a4"}{Accept-Ranges: bytes}