Many sites list a number of locations where you can download a file--sometimes buried a few pages deep. Different users will click or find different locations for the same file. As different users share the one URL they clicked on, the FileMirrors.com database will add them as possible mirrors for a file. With enough users sharing, this will let everyone find more mirrors for files, helping everyone to get faster and more reliable downloads. All this searching and sharing is done automatically when this FileMirrors.com searching is enabled.
Using FileMirrors.com for searching is off by default when you install GetRight, so you need to turn it on if you wish to use this service.
The more people who enable the URL sharing when using this, the better the
database will be for everyone. The Peer-to-Peer programs (like Napster) are a good comparison: if nobody shared,
they would be useless. (Unlike the file sharing programs, you are not sharing the files themselves, and are not sharing your computer's resources,
just the URL where you found a file--a small extra bit of text added to the search request.)
The intent of this service is NOT to track individual user's downloads. It is to anonymously build a database of mirrors for downloads so everyone can benefit from faster and more reliable downloads.
Even when enabled, GetRight will not use this service for all downloads. GetRight will only use this service for: 1) EXE or Compressed file types--EXE, ZIP, RAR, etc. No images, MP3s, web pages, etc. 2) downloads that do not use a username/password. 3) and files at least 100K in size.
The information in the database may be used for aggregate statistics for things like "yesterday's most requested files" on the FileMirrors.com website.