What are these "usage statistics" reported with the newer versions of IQFeed?

I apologize if I seem alarmist but you have to understand that I don't like anything that could possibly affect my trading and I definitely don't like software that spies on my system. What is it reporting exactly and why? Can I disable it? "Anonymous" reporting is not an answer because an IP address is usually enough information to connect a user to "statistics".

Thanks

Hello, there is no way to turn off usage stats in IQFeed. As you pointed out, you can make them anonymous and when you do, we do not store your loginID or your IP address.

We use the information we track to make the IQFeed product better (we don't use it for advertisements and we certainly do not sell the information). It allows us to know what kind of hardware and operating conditions our software runs on/in. It also allows us to know what features of IQFeed are being used (or not being used) and to identify potential problems with IQFeed and/or 3rd party applications.

Other than your loginID and IP address (unless you set it to anon), we gather the following inforation:

Machine Stats
CPU
RAM available
OS
Latency to our servers (a single ping)

Session Stats
How long you are connected.
What clients have launched the feed.
Maximum number of clients connected at one time.

Services Stats (new as of IQF 4.9)
All fields usedduring the session
What ClientNames have been sent to IQFeed.

Diagnostics Stats are only tracked if we detect that a client app isn't keeping up with the feed and data is being queued in IQConnect to compensate. In this scenario we track information information about the queue:
How large of a queue
How long it took to clear
What type of data (level1/level2/lookup)