WordPress 2.3 has just been released and already there’s a lot of buzz about it. A little bit ago I got an IM from an old workmate to an article on Slashdot about privacy issues in the new version. After reading the article and looking at the thread on Google Groups it doesn’t seem like its that big of a deal. According to Matt
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-wordpress-core-update/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-wordpress-plugin-updates/
Matt also recommends:
“I would also recommend disabling the updates in Mac OS X, Firefox,
Windows, Thunderbird, Adobe Photoshop, and any other third-party
applications you have. As all of those are tied to your personal IP and
not your server IP they have far more implications for privacy.”
It’s still early and I may be misinformed but is this really that big of a deal? I mean Google’s system reads your email in order to send targeted Adsense ads to Gmail and now there’s a phone company that’s going to monitor calls in order to trigger targetted ads. (OMG!) My privacy is important to me but sharing what plugin’s I use isn’t a big deal, especially if its giving back to the developers to make an already awesome application that much better.
With that being said I probably won’t be switching to the new version anytime soon mainly because I don’t see the need. Whenever something is released early there are going to be bugs, plus I’d like to see where the privacy concerns with the latest version lead. I’m sure we’ll hear much more about this as the word spreads…..
