9 ms·

Is it strange that I'm worried why the fuck they have these stats in the first place? I don't remember being asked whether I'd like my data submitted or not upo

by foxX 13y ago

Is it strange that I'm worried why the fuck they have these stats in the first place? I don't remember being asked whether I'd like my data submitted or not upon playing games powered by Unity. Do they also have my IMEI, phone contacts, emails and twitter accounts?

aras_p 13y ago
Do you have similar reaction when games do analytics (99% of them do)? Or when websites ping google analytics? "do they also have my IMEI,contacts,..." - no we don't. We don't have your actual hardware stats either; all we have is "this quarter, this many Android 4.1s" and "that quarter, that many Tegra 3s". The games can turn off hardware stats reporting if they wish to.
- foxX 13y ago
  And people tell me I'm being paranoid for keeping my firewall on "block outbound", running as non-admin (windows), running the browser with noscript, adblock and no external cookies...
  - baq 13y ago
    that's not paranoid; running the browser in a vm and doing a snapshot restore daily is.
- reitzensteinm 13y ago
  As a Unity developer, I had no idea my games were phoning home to Unity HQ. This definitely seems like something that should be opt-in. Also, maybe I'm being dense, but I can't find any information on how to turn it off or find it in the editor - could you share exactly what the option is called?
potatolicious 13y ago
> "Do they also have my IMEI, phone contacts, emails and twitter accounts?" No, that would be impossible without the app getting permission from you first. > "why the fuck they have these stats in the first place?" Because they need the stats to build the app. Knowing that a large percentage of their users are on Android 2.x prevents them from making breaking changes that won't work on older phones. Knowing the graphical and CPU performance of their demographics helps inform them of the limitations they need to place on their games to make them run properly on every device. Or would you like to go back to the days where developers built completely blind to their target user base and simply published a set of System Requirements and leaves end users to decipher it and make sure they're compliant with it just to play your game? This is no different than websites counting the number of page views and the browser market share of their visitors. This is purely aggregate work.

by foxX 13y ago

aras_p 13y ago

Do you have similar reaction when games do analytics (99% of them do)? Or when websites ping google analytics? "do they also have my IMEI,contacts,..." - no we don't. We don't have your actual hardware stats either; all we have is "this quarter, this many Android 4.1s" and "that quarter, that many Tegra 3s". The games can turn off hardware stats reporting if they wish to.

foxX 13y ago
And people tell me I'm being paranoid for keeping my firewall on "block outbound", running as non-admin (windows), running the browser with noscript, adblock and no external cookies...
- baq 13y ago
  that's not paranoid; running the browser in a vm and doing a snapshot restore daily is.
reitzensteinm 13y ago
As a Unity developer, I had no idea my games were phoning home to Unity HQ. This definitely seems like something that should be opt-in. Also, maybe I'm being dense, but I can't find any information on how to turn it off or find it in the editor - could you share exactly what the option is called?

potatolicious 13y ago

> "Do they also have my IMEI, phone contacts, emails and twitter accounts?" No, that would be impossible without the app getting permission from you first. > "why the fuck they have these stats in the first place?" Because they need the stats to build the app. Knowing that a large percentage of their users are on Android 2.x prevents them from making breaking changes that won't work on older phones. Knowing the graphical and CPU performance of their demographics helps inform them of the limitations they need to place on their games to make them run properly on every device. Or would you like to go back to the days where developers built completely blind to their target user base and simply published a set of System Requirements and leaves end users to decipher it and make sure they're compliant with it just to play your game? This is no different than websites counting the number of page views and the browser market share of their visitors. This is purely aggregate work.