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Analytics

Anton collects anonymous usage events — for example "session started" or "first query" — to help the MindsDB team understand how the product is used.

What is sent​

Every event carries:

  • the action name (e.g. anton_started),
  • a timestamp,
  • an anonymous installation ID.

Some events also carry anonymous measurements of that action — for example a datasource event names the engine (postgres), and the measurement events carry token counts, model names, durations and an opaque conversation id. These are numbers, names and identifiers only.

The measurement events are the two that report on Anton's own work rather than on something you did: what a turn cost, and how the memory-retrieval step behaved while assembling a prompt.

No personal data or query content is ever sent — no prompts, no message text, no tool output, no file contents, no file paths, no credentials, no hostnames, no email addresses. The installation ID is a one-way SHA-256 hash of the machine's network adapter address, truncated to 16 hex characters; the raw address never leaves your device. Events are fire-and-forget: they never block Anton and a failure to send is never surfaced to you. Failures on the measurement events are recorded in Anton's own debug log; failures on the other events are discarded without a trace.

The one exception is exit. If a send is still in flight when Anton is closing, it is given up to one second to finish before Anton exits anyway. In an interactive session there is normally nothing left to wait for, so this costs nothing; it matters for short-lived commands that would otherwise exit before the event left the machine. Turning analytics off removes the wait along with the send.

Where it goes​

Two transports, depending on the event:

  • Most events are a single HTTP GET to a MindsDB-operated collector, at ANTON_ANALYTICS_URL. That collector forwards them to PostHog.
  • The measurement events are an HTTPS POST directly to PostHog Inc. (us.i.posthog.com), a US analytics processor. A body rather than a query string, so the values do not end up in intermediate access logs.

Either way the data ends up in PostHog; the difference is whether it passes through MindsDB's collector on the way.

Opting out​

Set the environment variable:

export ANTON_ANALYTICS_ENABLED=false

Or add it to your workspace config (.anton/.env):

ANTON_ANALYTICS_ENABLED=false

That switch covers every event on every transport.

Turning off one transport only​

ANTON_ANALYTICS_URL set empty stops every event. Re-pointing it moves only the collector-path events; the measurement events still go to PostHog. To disable just those, set an empty key:

ANTON_POSTHOG_KEY=

To turn everything off everywhere, put ANTON_ANALYTICS_ENABLED=false in the global ~/.anton/.env. See Environment variables for how the config files are loaded, and Security model for the full picture of what leaves your machine.