OpenEye is (mostly) a developer tool, that collects mods' usage and crash reports. It also delivers notifications (created by mod authors) to clients.
OpenEye consist of two parts: the mod and this website.
You will be helping mod developers by sending crash reports as soon as possible. You will also receive information about updates and known crashes (and solutions) when available.
We also hope OpenEye will reduce console spam on startup, we are giving mod authors a single place (accessible from the main menu) where they can post notes about the exact version of their mod.
As a side effect of the analytics part, we also hope to collect a big list of mods. We hope it can be useful to other projects.
We are aware that "analytics" may sound scary. So we did some extra work to handle your data with care:
Looks like we derped. We are sorry, but there is no reliable protection against unexpected personal data sent in crash reports.
If you see such data, report it to us via EsperNet IRC and we will edit it out. We will also try to filter it in our next version.
Any data sent and received by the server is saved on disk (in the 'reports' folder in you Minecraft installation directory). You can review it if you wish. Data from your current session is available only when Minecraft is closed. You can also explore all of the data we hold in the database.
While there are a few tools that do a similar job, we try to take it further by offering help back to the user.
Mojang already collects crash data, with Hopper. It doesn't include any informations about mods, though. Looking for crashes in a single mod on a 100-something page is not fun.
We are sorry you don't like us :`(. Come and chat with us on IRC and we'll make sure your mod doesn't get listed.
We cannot suppress crash collection, though, since it could interfere with crashes for other mods/mod interactions
Short answer: No, unless you really want it.
Long answer: There is a single option (haltOnDangerousFiles) that causes loading in certain conditions. It is disabled by default and should only be enabled by people who are fully aware of what it does.
You can filter incoming and outgoing data with the config options.
If you don't want any data to be sent, you can use vanilla snooper settings.
And of course, you can always remove OpenEye completely. It won't corrupt any data (including savefiles).
No. All connections are initiated by the client. All data is sent via HTTP.
Yes, it's released under the very liberal MIT license. Source is available here: https://github.com/OpenMods/OpenData
Even if you have JRE 8u101 (first one which includes some important information) or later, you may not be using it. Mojang's vanilla launcher bundles quite old version of JRE.
If that prompt bothers you, you can select proper JVM manually from profile config.