Application deployment & Legality concerns

[Iat]

Hi all,
Just wonder if it is legally or morally sound to implant a phone home functionality within an application without the user's knowledge. The purpose of this functionality is to gather who and how many people installed your application.
The phone home functionality is basically an outbound SMTP email to the author with the collected hostname and IP address of the machine installed with the application. Secondly, let's assume you disclaimed the phone home functionality to the user when they install the application, would it then has the adequacy of morally and legality?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Iat

[randem]

No, it is not moral and can be considered spyware. What you can do is upon installation you can notify them that you want to "phone home" and let them decide if they would like that to happen with them.

Some would consider this an invasion of privacy due to the fact that they cannot confirm just what you are sending "home". But if you let them know what you are doing and what you are sending they might be inclined to allow it.

Spyware is considered illegal...

[Iat]

Great advice! Thanks Randem.