[R] Questions about R

[Rui Barradas]

Às 12:10 de 17/08/2023, Shaun Parr escreveu:
> 
> 
> Sent from Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
> 
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> My name is Shaun and I work in an organisation where one of our users wishes to install the R software and our process is to assess the safety of anyone software prior to authorisation. I can’t seem to locate all the information that we require on the webpage, so could someone kindly advise me of the following information please?
> 
> 1. Please can you confirm what user information the software collects (E.g. Name, password, e-mail address, any Personally Identifiable Information etc)?
> 2. If any is collected, please can you confirm if the information collected by the software stays locally on the device or if it is transferred anywhere. If it is transferred, could you please advise where it is transferred to (E.g. your own servers, or a third party data centre such as Amazon Web Services or Azure)?
> 3. Are there any third-party components installed within the software and, if so, are these also kept up-to-date?
> 
> If you could kindly advise this information, it would be really appreciated, thank you 😊
> 
> 
> Shaun
> 
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Hello,

1. R itself? None. Download from CRAN and install. There are OS related 
installation issues, namely authorization but that information is not 
asked for nor recorded by R.
2. The answer to "If any is collected" is already given above.
3. I am not sure I understand this point. R comes with third-party 
components and their developers try to keep them up-to-date. This has 
nothing to do with PII.
CRAN is the main official repository for contributed packages.  From [1]:

Available Packages

Currently, the CRAN package repository features 19955 available packages.


and the R  instruction

available.packages() |> nrow()
# [1] 19931

says a number close to that one.


Those packages are developed and contributed by volunteers and it's 
impossible for the CRAN maintainers  to check what exactly those 
packages do but those packages' source code must be submited and anyone 
willing to check them can.

[1] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/

Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas