I think they are working on the next version which should give a choice to turn on or off stealth mode. 
Man, I came in here to see if there was a way to do an “update” directly form the app instead of a manual download and install, and then I find issues like this for the newer version. I too will say this is a deal breaker to me. I will stick with the old version until my sub ends then move on.
Thanks everybody for the contribution on this topic and thanks to @april2 for the forensic work to prove that we actually do what we say we do.
To recap. Based on all the feedback we have received, since version 3.0.482 we give ALL users the OPTION to use advanced security features based on anonymously crowdsourced information from other users (currently “GlassWire score” -ie. app popularity - and Average Traffic Consumption per application, with more metrics to come). The way this is done is by creating baselines, so users who are interested in this can understand what is a “normal” application behaviour out there and compare themselves to such average values. It’s only normal that to be able to see and benefit from these baselines, you have to share the information in the first place so that the baselines can be created. There is no stealth monitoring going on, you are just willingly taking part in a crowdsourcing effort and benefitting from it at the same time.
To be clear, we are NOT pushing ads (nor do we ever plan to), we are NOT collecting hardware information, NOR are we doing any of the nefarious things a number of you are dreaming of. To tell you how popular an app is, we simply gather the list of apps present in an endpoint. To tell you the average traffic consumption of an application, we gather the consumption evidenced from the endpoint. We collect this information anonymously and give you back average values from all the participating user base. We plan to add to this. For example soon you will be able to see if the version of your application is the latest available out there and/or if it needs to be patched/upgraded for addressing vulnerabilities.
If you are not interested in this functionality, or for whatever reason are uncomfortable with it, you can chose to disable ALL crowdsourced and/or cloud based functionality in the Permissions tab. This will stop ANY data contribution from your endpoint and revert the application to work purely on a standalone, local basis as it has done since inception
For the sake of completeness and for the avoidance of doubt, once you disable crowdsourced features, the ONLY data that Glasswire will ever share from your endpoint with our server is the state of your license and its version number to a) prove that you are actually running a genuine and licensed version of our software and b) to trigger an automatic update if available. The check-in-for-update mechanism has been present for years and is nothing new. With regards to the license check, we have had too many problems with the activation codes which have been circulating historically and we have had to introduce cloud based licensing to keep up with times. We have probably gone overboard with the frequency of these checks and we’ll reduce such frequency going forward but a periodic licence check will nonetheless remain part of the normal behaviour of the application. As per the auto-updates, we’ll give users the ability to opt out of automatic updates, if so desired, in one of the next releases.
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