Last time an author was asking to connect with my account for updating his item. And I can’t believe what I saw there:
“Authorize eyecix to connect with your account?”
eyecix will be able to:
View and search Envato sites
View your Envato Account username
View your email address
View your account profile details Download your purchased items
Verify purchases of your items
Verify purchases you’ve made
View your purchases of the app creator’s items
With my permission, notabene, only for keeping my item updated, he’s able to download all
my purchased items. In my eyes an absolute impertinence. How can Envato allow this, why do they offer this option?
Hey there. You should not be worried about this, as these are usually API requirements author use on their support sites to verify that you indeed made a purchase with your account. In case however, you have suspicions that an author is abusing the API system to get more information than required, you can contact Envato Help and Support and they can investigate their system thoroughly to assess if these API permissions are truly valid or in breach of terms.
I did not agree with your answer. It’s too casually. Please tell why anybody should be able to download my purchased items. Why they offer this option to a third party person?
In my experience, many authors will use that permission to easily download updates for their theme, without hosting it on their own servers and making their own separate license system.
Exactly as my colleague @baileyherbert mentioned, authors can use the API to simplify the update process of themes. This is an incredibly beneficial system for customers that lack the knowledge to edit and update themes.
You also have the alert window you copy pasted your initial message from, to inform you of the usage the API connection will make. And as I mentioned in my initial reply, if you believe these are malevolent authors you can always contact Envato Help and Support and inform them about a possible policy breach in the API.
Envato Support will always investigate these claims to make sure that there are no illegal activities occurring with your API key or your licenses.
Are you about to tell me, that this process will not work without this permission: Download your purchased items Absolute nonsens. I can’t see any reason why an external person should be able to download my purchased items. So he’s able to get my purchased items for free. Sorry, no understanding for this.
My previous answer still stands. Some authors require these permission as explained above. If you require more information on this matter please Envato Help and Support.
From what I know, the “Download your purchased items” only refers to those items of that author. So an author cannot download other items you bought from another author. Even if you agree with that permission…
Looking at Envato API technical details: https://build.envato.com/api/#market_0_Buyer_Download it seems that downloading items method returns an item based on that item id and purchase code. So it returns only an item.
This means that the author who requests this permission (Download your purchased items) will only be able to download his item you bought from him (not ALL items purchased by you from Envato Market, from other authors)
this brings some light into the discussion. If so, of course this is no problem if he only can download his own item. So this confusion is caused by Envato’s ambiguous statement. They should state this clear for everyone.
I can see why you’re upset about the author getting the ability to download your items. However, please understand that the author of the app in question (eyecix here) has purposefully configured their app to request these specific permissions. We provide a number of permissions that app authors can make use of, but it’s up to them which they request from their end users. I can’t say why this one is asking for permission to download your items – perhaps to automatically update the plugin? As you’re (understandably) not comfortable with this permission, you might want to tell the author about it so they can either update their app’s permissions or possibly refund your purchase.
Our API Terms and Conditions do prohibit app authors from any illegal activity, which includes downloading your purchased items.
In this case I believe a better option would be a permission for an app to download only those items written by the app author – so this app would only be able to download the JobSearch plugin and any other items by eyecix. Would you be more comfortable with that? This isn’t a permission that exists today, but I’ll see about getting it added.
