I am really disappointed that these new privacy settings are opt-out rather than opt-in.

If I would not have seen this post, my details would have been revealed for all to see.

At least ASK the user upon first sign in if they want to show their profile.

Even with all the privacy settings turned off it still shares my USERNAME.

I stupidly signed up with my real name as my user name and I DO NOT want my username to be a findable profile.

Can I change the username? or at least hide it?

using a throwaway for obvious reasons.

Depending on what you mean by "when it goes live", that may be too little too late. In my opinion, much as several others have said in the thread, the proper workflow for this feature is:

- Add the new knobs to user account settings page. At this point, the knobs save settings to the database, but none of the features that the knobs control are user-accessible, so users have exactly as much or as little privacy as they did before the knobs were added. For example, users cannot list anyone's game library at this stage, because that's a new feature.
- Post on the main page an announcement that the knobs exist, and link to documentation on how it works. Linking to a forum thread in the announcement is fine. However, as others have said, this thread is not particularly discoverable without a separate news announcement. It's not a STICKY. It's not a NEWS post. Aside from the fact that the opening poster has a trailing blue (GOG), it's not particularly notable in any way. I only caught it because there are so many unhappy users posting in it that it's staying fairly close to the top of the recently active threads list. (A broadcast e-mail would also be good at this stage. The key point is that every user who monitors his/her account at all will have days to consider how to handle the new knobs.)
- Include in the announcement a specific future date (at least 1 week, but several weeks would be better) on which the new features will go live.
- When that announced date arrives, only then will users be able to use the new features (such as listing other people's libraries) on the then-unsecured accounts.

This flow gives everyone, not just lucky forum readers, the opportunity to know about the change and deliberate on their options for several days before a decision is due. As is, anyone who misses this forum thread (which, as above, is easy to miss) will only discover the settings after their information is already made visible. This is rude and, in some cases, may backfire. I imagine some people will see the announcement, decide they disagree with the everything-public-by-default design that GOG adopted, and rush over to make their data maximally private without taking the time to evaluate the options in detail. As a result, such users will share less than they might have if they'd had more time to consider their choices. They may not revisit those decisions later, so they end up undersharing for a long time. Given GOG's apparent interest in maximizing user sharing, that result is exactly what you don't want to encourage.

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Regarding documentation for the new features, try to describe in some detail what users can learn about others' accounts through the new features. For example, there is some confusion over what "full game library" will show. Will it let us see what the user paid for the game (full price, on-sale, gift code, GOG giveaway)? Will we see the date when the user added that game to his/her library? How does that interact with Galaxy's time-played tracking? Can we see tags that the user assigned to the game ("completed"; "abandoned"; "sucks"; etc.)? I don't expect you to answer these questions inline, but I suggest you have answers ready as part of the general announcement so that people do not need to experiment to find the answers.

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Separate from the workflow issue, I also second complaints made elsewhere in the thread that the presentation of the choices, and in particular the "Your visibility" choice, is unnecessarily confusing. "Your visibility" would have been better as a two-option select ("Nobody"; "Everybody"), similar to the three-option select boxes for the other choices. The existing design of an auto-saving checkbox with a label that always describes the current state is not new, but it is weird. Like others above, my initial interpretation of an unchecked box labeled "Nobody can find me" is that the protection is not enabled (that is, "it is not the case that nobody can find me"; or "it is the case that somebody can find me") and I should click the box to make the statement "Nobody can find me" become true. That's not how it works, but it's how I expect it to work based on the labeling.

So GOG is prepraing to launch e-peen measuring contests ;).
Who knows. I think that besides microtransactions in TF2 & co. trading cards are steam's second biggest cash cow.

File a support ticket and ask for it to be changed. Might take several days due to the sale drawing more support inquiries, but they'll sort you out. :) But you can't post in the forums or chat anonymously, if that's what you meant.
Also, there's checkbox in your privacy settings that disallows your being able to be found by username and e-mail in searches via the Friend search (and any similar community search functions that might supplement or replace that).

Not active on the forums. Just happen to swing in via a link to this post.

Turned everything to nobody or only me. All in all I wouldn't mind if the profiles were a opt-in type of system. New users would have the option when they make an account otherwise it's just a basic account like we all have right now. And existing users can opt in for those who wish to share. Sure profile w/e usage isn't going to reach as high as you would expect number wise but it will make the kinds of people who use GOG much happier.

Thank you gog for keeping options to privacy. Much appreciate it.

My previous post may have been misunderstood.

What I'm saying is such privacy settings are basically the standard today and there's a good reason for doing so - deciding for people who don't care to decide. It's also better for those who want to use such features, because they'd want the ability to find more people who play the same games, etc.

Also noteworthy is that it's likely that only activity will be seen by just anyone with default privacy settings - I am positive the profile won't display any personal information, such as real name or age, without you filling it with data. Lists of friends and games will only be shown to friends, so that leaves us only with activity.

Now, I'm not at all saying that all is good in that case. It's simply the scale I'm surprised in. Most people complaining about the fact someone will see they played Heroes 3 merrily go about posting photos (which in most cases include digital location data) on Facebook and using Windows 10 and Google Chrome on a daily basis. And you're not even forced by GOG to share that - all in all, rather useless - data.

As I said, there is a reason for making it default to public rather than private. Instead of being angry at GOG for such default settings and asking them to change them, why not ask for a pop-up window at first login with a question on your privacy settings? Or for emails to be sent to everyone informing them about the changes?

Most people simply shout "private by default", which would be simply bad for GOG and bad for those who want to make use of these social features.

And it's kind of ironic that people who say they feel like adults in a kindergarten want to leave the community just because a feature they don't have to use is being introduced. Oh well.

I am afraid that is not the point. Privacy laws are developed and implemented to protect the user, or to protect someone's profits. Sure have a lotgin window and emails, but the default should still be private until such time as the user physically chooses to change that. Your example of playing might &a magic is designed to be jokey and misleading, as I am sure you are well aware that certain information in certain countries can have extreme consequences.
What is worse, having people beaten in the street because it's now known they play deviant games or that you have to change a setting to let a few friends know your playing a game?
No, I am afraid peivate by default is the minimum level, in addition to which there should be login screens, emails, specific guidance as to what exactly is shared, how, and with what third parties etc. Cost/benefit ratio should always be skewed in favour of cost over benefit, unfortunately hat is a hard uphill struggle.

Let me be the first........................BYE!

So all that horrific facebook stuff introduced at the historically worst possible moment, when even the US started being interested in something called privacy rights, was literally only foreshadowing that similar vomiting of customer data into the internet would take place, and here we are. A thread named "introducing new privacy settings" that only means "introducing new ways to give up our customers' privacy".

For more than five years we've been waiting for that new forum, and that's the social media madness GOG wastes time and energy for instead. How cool is that. Not at all, not at all. See how the downvote option generates instant negativity? Just imagine what community wars can be fought over public friends lists.

And that visibility checkbox is just heinous.

"DRM free", a whole lot of the idea and ideology is about privacy, and privacy by default. So while I usually roll my eyes over naysayers that buy from GOG only under the utmost protest and spread of negativity, while I usually understand GOG's rather complex market position, here's some motherfucker of a line in the sand.

I modestly suggest to reconsider.

This is very uncomfortable indeed. Partnering up with Facebook is very, very bad.

Thanks gog for the heads up.
Usually I'm a rather private person, so I'd opt-out of most settings like seemingly most here, but to finally have a public games list on gog is a feature I very much missed and am happy that it'll come.

And for one specific reason: bundles!
I friggin hate that I always have to double check if I already own a game on gog before purchasing a bundle whereas for steam there's good scripts around that colormark all games already owned on steam from a bundle. So this is the feature I'm looking for and therefore I ask same as someone else did before:

Will there be an api, that let's one scrape the data of the owned games list?

if so then it should be easy to make the usual tables for bundles on steamgifts colormark all games already owned on gog, too (same as with steam games). Which would be nice :)

Gogspy here we come!

I noticed that the options for "your wishlist can be seen by" are "everyone", "friends only", and "nobody", while the others have "everyone", "friends only", and "only me". I assume that "nobody" and "only me" in this case means the same thing (as it would not make sense that not even myself can see my wishlist), but in that case the wording should be the same, too.
Yeah. Having that option be binary is bad. It needs to be either two options (let people find me by username [y|N], let people find me by e-mail [y|N]), or a three-option choice (none, username, username+email).