i also agree on all things said: you can protect on many things.... i always use incognito except when i buy games cause i dont know if the online pay services ( for prepaid) need cookies in order to make a succesfull transaction
and i dont want to send cash and not get any goods :D As for kids only? adults are even worse, it is proven that adults and the ones with the high degrees and IQ are among the majority, there was the metoo thing a while ago and they also said that not only the low grade but many times the socalled top class was guilty of some nasty things.

Anyway ... people will used that info indeed to - vote posts and reply with a line like: you are complaining but you still bought x number of games on ??? date .

I myself will never do that, no down voting for me because if you dont like some posts you dont have to - vote just let them be, if you do think posts are good you can choose to vote up but - bvoting just because others did is childish.

You are mixing up control and privacy there. The fact that android may allow you more flexibility does not mean they are more private. In fact, I would not assume that the invasiveness of either company is any better or worse than the other. Whilst DRM is indeed bad in terms of control, the fact that apple controls all of it rather than being wide open like android, possible evens aids in privacy as its harder to hack, or create apps which leak or steal your data. Each app has to go through apple store.

Don't get me wrong, both companies are balls out, blatently scraping every bit of data they can get their grubby paws on. In fact I can't even imagine in this day and age anything remotely electronic not grasping every bit of information. All I am saying is that drm has very little impact on that.

Can't always use HuniePop as an example... ;-)

You can put custom ROMs on an Android phone and choose not to use Google's apps on it.
As far as I know, this isn't the case for the iPhone.

I know. They just destroyed, every and all privacy settings with that.

Great marketing coup, GOG! I just cleared out my wish list. No sense having it if I don't intend to ever buy from you again. Do enjoy my publicly visible game count. It just became a constant. I'd rather encourage DRM than deal with a company that violates its customers' trust.

I think that's too pessimistic. My experience is that such companies do row back if customer angryness reaches a certain level. Actually that's about the only way to make them rethink anything.

LOL! Your profile alone made this whole thing worth it.

Also what's next, GOG? Trading cards?

Okay,we shall see.Protests don't always work.

If you can hide almost anything why not hiding really everything? The effort needed for that should not be very high.

Also you don't know how and if the people here use their browsers, OS, apps and multiple services. Maybe many users here are also more cautious outside of GOG. Finally, even it were kind of overreacting, wouldn't it be the right of the customer to do that?


True. I'll check back in a week for a possible reaction of GOG.

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This is getting off-topic, but you just said it yourself: "Each app has to go through apple store."

That is a form of DRM which also causes issues of privacy, as the store can track each and every app you have ever installed. Hacked, cracked, and rooted phones being an exception.

Also, whether you use for instance Google search on Android or iPhone probably makes very little difference on how much data gets tracked to Google. What is different, is that iPhone prevents installing alternative, more secure browsers, which aren't available in the store.

But you cannot hide everything, which is the bone of contention. A roof is either watertight, or it leaks. That most of it holds off water isn't really the hallmark of a great roof, and necessitates repairs. Again: The status quo, at least for citizens of the EU, is that any business has to treat your data as carefully as possible. That means that they may only even collect data that directly pertains to the business relationship between them and their customers. The data that is collected then needs to be handled with care, i.e. it may only be shared with third parties as is necessary in that business relationship - and the people whose data it is, they need to be informed about it (edit: I still haven't got a notification from GOG about the profile feature, I only know about it because it was discussed on third-party sites). If you want to use that data in any capacity that goes over that, you need provable consent from the party that's affected, and you cannot just get blanket consent either - it has to be specific for each data point, and how you want to share it.
That means that just having such data public (and the size of your library and your play time can considered to be such data) with no way to hide it for the customer is a violation of the GDPR - which is the legislation that governs all that stuff.

It does not matter if we as random forum shlubs can see it as immediate threat to privacy; As the CA scandal showed a while back: With meta data being what it is, any data that is made public is too much data. The EU recognized that, which is why they introduced the GDPR in the first place: We have a right that our data is protected, period.

Then: The argument that "Hey, you use something else that also violates your privacy" isn't sound. On the one hand, just because one company violates your rights doesn't mean you have to accept every company violating your rights.
On the other hand, some of us do value our privacy more than just chewing out GOG for not living up to our standards: Not everyone uses Instagram, FB, Whatsapp, Twitter, a browser without noscript, a smartphone and so on. Hell, I only actively started buying on GOG when they introduced the wallet function, because it lets me pay GOG without them getting any financial information from me (I use an anonymized pre-paid credit card that you can buy with actual paper money).

Lastly: Informing a company that their business practices currently is losing them active customers is not bullying, it is a courtesy: We tell them exactly why we stop giving them our business and what they have to do to regain it, which isn't some eldritch ritual either, but a mere compliance with their own principle of treating a customer as a customer, and complying with actual law. Can't ask fairer than that, I think.

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@toxicTom: Thanks for the kind words, though I am afraid I do have a cantankerous streak (as this very response probably showcases). Depending on how and if GOG reacts, maybe I'll mull participating outside of this thread over.

I am here for the games, the video games that is, not your social achievements feeds thingies.

I suspected that, but I think the reason I just noticed now is that it it shown so prominently in the new Profile page, that everyone can easily access. To be honest, I rarely post here publicly so I'd not really noticed, but I am more concerned about it now due to the profile addition than I was before.

That said, I absolutely hate when sites don't let you opt out of "show when I'm online".

It's bad enough with Messenger type apps which are at least designed for communication, but on an e-commerce game store website? Why should everyone who shops where you do know when you're online or not?! Friends (real ones), maybe at a push (but only if I choose that), but who else needs to know and why?

Still, at least not as bad as social media that shows your "friends" where you are physically for some unfathomable reason ("Oh look, Fred is in the pub down the road! Didn't he say he was working tonight?") or matches your face in everybody's photos like some Orwellian nightmare that some folks actually seem to think is somehow a good thing.

LOL! I'm internet famous for a second! Notably, I'm quoted being "wrong", however, since it turns out that online status was always shown and not a new profiles thing, right? I don't mind, and stand by not being able to toggle that as a violation of my privacy, and if quoting that helps make more people stand up to such a practice on any website that forcibly shows when you are online, so much the better... but that site maybe should have checked before using a random poster on the internet as a source? :)