Postcards From My Life
This isn’t quite a plugin, rather a function for a plugin. Bunny discusses the advantages and possible dilemma’s of a plugin “phoning home”. If more plugins had this feature, I might just be out a blog 
Anyway, if you are a plugin developer, you may want to pop over and further the discussion, or better, incorporate the function into your own.
Hi,
I’ve not read bunny’s comments but I thing it is a good thing if plugins have the ability to phone home. I’ve decided a couple things about the BlogBling series while will eventually all be able to phone home.
1: I am not interested in collecting stats about the servers that use my plugins, so I don’t.. That may change in the future but honestly, I don’t see it.
2: I think it is important to allow the user to turn this automatic functionality off. There are a lot of paranoids like myself out there that don’t believe it when people like me say they don’t collect info on them. Being able to turn if off, even if they don’t, allows them to be in control of the process.
3: I’m moving it into an object (I’ll publish it when it’s done) that should be easily incorporated into any WP plugin.
Just my thoughts, YMMV,
=C=