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Comment by M95D | Hacker News Reader

Hi.

I saw that there are scoreboards on the website. Does this mean that the game includes some form of user tracking? Does the website (play.date) know how often a user plays, when, for how long, how good he/she is at it, etc.? Is there a unique user ID or device ID that they can pair with past&future aquisitions in the shop?

I don't own that game and I probably never will. I'm just asking this to educate myself about what's possible in terms of invasion of privacy by using a low power console such as this one.

Thanks.

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I'll answer just in case you're actually interested in having a conversation. All of the scoreboard info can be found in the API docs:

https://help.play.date/catalog-developer/scoreboard-api/

Don't want scoreboards? Don't connect to wifi. It baffles me that someone would be paranoid about this.

I really am interested and it baffles me that nobody else has privacy as a priority in their life, but down-voted my question instead.

playdate.scoreboards.addScore sends just the rank, player and value data, or is there a device ID added in the background? If not, how do they prevent spamming/cheating? Is player value user-defined? For this game only or all games on the device? Is it sent with https or just http?

Thank you.

You read that wrong. What you're referring to is the response you get from the server in the form of callback parameters. The function signature is

    playdate.scoreboards.addScore(boardID, value, callback)

So you only send the boardID and the score. You get the player name back as part of the callback.

You are probably being downvoted for derailing. This is a post about a particular game, but this thread is turning into an ideological battle unrelated to the game. Discussions regarding people's priorities and privacy concerns would be better off as a separate post.

Oh. Ok. I'll keep that in mind next time.

Presumably you need to be connected to wifi to obtain games, so that's not a great answer.

I also found the scoreboards surprising. I wouldn't expect a Gameboy-like device to be reporting things back to a server. I don't have any particular privacy concerns about it myself, but it is surprising, and I can see why people might object.

It also seems to contradict their privacy policy (https://panic.com/privacy/):

    Panic apps and products _do not_ send out _any_ private information. This includes
    ...
    Usernames
    ...

But the scoreboard API seems like it's tied to usernames...

> Presumably you need to be connected to wifi to obtain games

Not only that, but the API link provided by the author specifies that scores are stored in the device if Wifi is offline and uploaded later, so aparently, there's no way to block uploading unless the device is hard-reset (is that even possible?) before connecting to Wifi to get another game.

The only good thing I see is that the score board is not mandatory and it seems pretty benign if no other data is attached by the OS when scores are uploaded. But then, if scores are supported, 90% of the tracking infrastructure is already there.

You might want to read the Usage Analytics section of their privacy policy.

https://panic.com/privacy/

Given the context around that line, I interpret that as applying to their actual Mac applications that deal with usernames/password/hostnames, especially since the sentence that precedes that is

> Except as described above

And further up there is a carve-out for Playdate logging.

They also don't really need to send out your username for the API call -- they already know who you are because your device is tied to your account.

I do find it surprising that there is no way to not participate in leaderboards.

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