Yep. And if he keeps doing it, he'll stop being my friend at some point.

Er, so wait, if "everyone" is now the setting for logged-in GOG people, what's the actual "everyone including not logged in people" setting?

I've been wanting to share my game library with my outside-GOG gamer friends for a while now, so finding out I STILL won't be able to do that will be really frustrating...

+1s to all trying to communicate what the issues are here, and why; many many posts expressing my thoughts.

Special shout out to thomq for post #208.


Only visible to users who are logged in to GOG? Only? Well, that's comforting to know. Really? Users who are logged in to GOG include people I've interacted here before, people I've not, people that don't use the forum, people that just fire up the client. I'm sure you know how many people that may be at any given time, as I'm also sure that it's a whole lot of people; do you really think that there's anyone using GOG that considers all these people as their friends or family in any way, shape or form? I'm well aware that your wording is just PR lingo, but I'll say it anyway - we are just a group of different users on some digital distribution platform. You are an online store for digital distributed games, not my community centre or my home; there at least no one would decide for me what info about me is available to everyone else visiting.

I don't appreciate this approach and argumentation, let alone it being used to justify how you seem determined to go about this. People I've not exchanged a single word here don't even qualify as passing online acquaintances in my book; it's not up to you to decide my friends or family, it's not up to you to allow others to see what I'm into, no matter how limited, and it certainly isn't up to you to let complete strangers peek into who my five recently active friends are, and their general info, without their permission. That's my business, and it should remain up to me to decide what info I share, regardless of the scope of it.

You thank us for the feedback we're posting. Well, I can't help but think of that "We're listening to your feedback" thread; I think we both know what actual results came out from the listening you've been doing since its inception. I can only hope this time it will be put to use, though the rest of your post is lingo to make us feel all warm inside, and convince us of how great and cool this is for all of us. As the feedback shows, it's not.


Well, when you don't say what is what exactly, confusion is bound to ensue, no?

But there's a more important issue that needs to be addressed.

First off, what does this "my activity" consist of? Seeing what the "general info" about one's five recently active friends includes, I can only surmise that one's own activity will reveal a lot more even though you label it "limited".

Secondly, and this is more alarming as it seems we won't have any control over it (Breja too addressed this).
Let's say I have all these settings set to "only me", but some of those on my friends list leave their profile at the default setting you've chosen for us. Do I understand it correctly that when I get on here, anyone checking out the profile of one of them will be able to see me listed among their five recently active friends, and peek at my general info, including the number of games I have? If I do understand this correctly, how does this respect my own personal preference to remain completely private?
Also, what purpose does it serve to broadcast how many games one has to random strangers for it to be included in one's "general info"?

Additionally, you mention "no. of achievements and hours played" which, as far as I know, applies only to those using the client to play games. Does this mean that these will report "zero" for the rest, or won't show at all?


Frankly, I don't quite understand why this one is different from the rest of the settings. The greyed out status when choosing to be non-visible in contrast to the bright green when choosing the opposite really feels like you're trying to condition us that choosing visibility is the better option. Changing the description is good, but making both choices visibly weigh the same would be better, imo.

And speaking of it, has the bug with friends suggestions not respecting this setting been fixed?


Well, if logged in people can peek at my general info via others' profiles even if I have all these social settings to "only me"...

And before you say "empty your friends list", if the above will work as I understand it, that's exactly what I'll do. Which in turn will come with no communication via chat with anyone, as setting my chat to "everyone" hasn't been an option for me for a long time.


You seem to be under the misguided impression that the country you see is the one everyone actual resides in. Indeed, we can't opt-out as it is now, because GOG's stance is that it's of no priority. So we do the next best thing, we circumvent it by choosing some other place in that setting. Which (randomly?) breaks, and reveals one's actual country, something one finds out only the next time they come online, but that's also of no priority to GOG. Hopefully, this will change in light of the upcoming GDPR.


Emm... nope, you weren't even the first one to bring it up in this thread.


I don't use any of them, also no Galaxy, no social media and no Google search. I think it's safe enough to say that the most vocal ones take our privacy seriously, and try to protect it as best possible.


You suggested this a few times by now, but this is the first time you mention under which condition until that first login happens. Yes, It is a reasonable solution, but only if the settings default to private until then (not "can" but "should" be), and I hope GOG implements it.

So many pages. I don't see any issue at all. The only people who care about their privacy are the ones who will switch the settings to private regardless. I for one want the setting to be defaulted to 'everyone can see' because most people will not even care to change anything.

I like seeing Jimmy be interested in jrpg titles and want to buy him a game. Now I can surprise Jimmy who doesn't know me with a game I know he doesn't own and might like. Or I can strike up a conversation with jimmy about a certain game we've both played. If forum freddy doesn't like being social with other people and have his privacy on max so nobody can disturb him while he's playing Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, that's also fine.

I mean what's the issue here? Or are we making an issue of a non-issue?

In Breja's words:

That's all good in theory, but let's talk practicality.

1. Most people will not even bother to look up all the information of a user that will get released when it's made private.
2. Even if people do, what do they actually see? Some activity, your friends and your game library . I'm not sure how you feel about it but it's not like they get to know you went to the grocery store or had a toilet break. Imho those are not really cause for any concern.

So I think it's more of the principle of it that is bothering people but the whole practicality and 'severeness' of this change is not as drastic as people make it out to be?

And the barrier of entry to logging into GOG is..?

Oh yeah, there isn't one.

Because you've never had anything happen without your intent, like games vanishing from people's libraries

Everyone knows GOG's code is rock solid and has never allowed for javascript attacks against forum users (more info on GOG Wiki), breaking posting two urls in the same line or man in the middle attacks.

In fact, while I was looking for the man-in-the-middle topic, I came across this old list. Seriously, one of the items in that was that people could sign up with a username that was already taken. As a programmer, I still don't grasp how they even managed to screw that one up, as it should be both a database constraint and one of the first tests in the test suite for user registration.

It's only a matter of time before people's privacy settings switch to something they didn't set to, or they aren't actually adhered to in some way.

Not only that, I've found a nice fresh issue!

If I go to my GOG wallet, where it shows the last 30 transactions, it shows one from 2 hours ago.. and then the one after that is in 2016, even though funds have been moving in/out of my GOG wallet from purchases I've made this year.

Seriously GOG. Face facts here! Your coding is shockingly poor (well, it was at first, the shock has worn off) and you shouldn't be doing anything with anyone's information.

EDIT: Oh wait, how could I forget the issue I found yesterday?

Look at their timing in putting up the facebook links, Hy. That's bulletproof cluelessness, there. Kevlar with depleted uranium inserts. lol

one thing is for sure, when we recently had the wave of unsollicited friends requests spam coming from nowhere, someone explained that a workaround for that (to avoid being displayed as a possible choice for those insane unknown friends requests) was to set off one of the privacy setting, the "can/can't find me" checkbox

and, after getting too many notification from friend requests by random unknown users i never heard off, i sure did switch this one "visibility" setting OFF as in "now hidden", like what, 4 days ago...

and yet today when i went to my privacy settings on my account after starting to read this thread... the damn thing was checked back on "now public" again

so, i always am shared between thinking that each new website upgrade bringing new features can reset settings (but i think it is poor web design, as one should normally code updates so that it doesnt trash/erase users settings) OR that such settings reset is deliberate just to push forwards like a caveman... (my ISP once pushed a router update that would reset user's wifi password to manufacturer default one, you know, the one that is litteraly displayed in pdf manuals of the router that anyone can find online... yet they denied it)
FB was notorious for doing that, to such a point that each big website update day was floodgate opening for doxxers and malevolent people to prey upon their target on those opportunities because they all knew settings were made to be resetted at those times !

so it CAN happen, it happened to me already 4 time within the last 3 years on gog; dunno if it's technical shortcoming and lack of planning or if it's deliberate to trick people onto those settings (as, usually, when you KNOW you already set up something, you dont check every day afterwards if it remained set the way you did)

what i really find disturbing, and possibly insulting is when people publicly deny th fact it can happen, just as i saw it from my very eyes, suggesting i'm a liar or i changed my mind completely and reverted every of my settings back to the opposite like a good schizophreniac or sleepwalker i am not.

SO, yes, your point is interesting here: is it just a recurring accident of lax technical updating... or a deliberate thing. What is the true "intent" ?

Don't get your hopes up. I still have to remember to click "classic downloader" in some sub-menu every time I download a game. And when I forget.. that's the time GOG gets their way. But, not for one moment, should they believe this will increase their userbase through word of mouth from my part. The contrary. Because we all are grown ups and know this is intentional behavior.

It is fundamentally wrong to push this onto users; people are customers, and need the freedom to choose about these matters, especially regarding privacy (opt in, not out) ... the new measures are forcing people to have to close down the friends side of things in order to get privacy, so it doesn't seem that being 'one happy family' matters in practice at all anyway. The more the 'we want others to see what you're into' is pushed, eg showing recent friends' info regardless of not wanting that showing, I honestly think people will just close down their profiles to the max and interest in Gog reduce. Forcing and confusing things, and not informing everyone professionally and properly, will backfire.

It's not about "Most people".
It's about the giant data brokers who'll get to extend their profiles with even more juicy bits of information all for the low cost of making a free account here, about the Russian government (and any other state level actors), about the specific person who is stalking you, about your mother-in-law, that crazy ex, your manager which has been looking for an excuse to get rid off you (or that co-worker who's angling for the same promotion), that troll from that other forum with too much time and knowledge on his hands, and so on.

Due to your activity being visible, they'll get to infer a whole lot of things about you. "gaming during daytime hours?" => must not have a job. "not gaming for a two week period in July?" => probably on vacation. "was active until 7 in the evening, and then started being active again at 3 o'clock at night on the weekend" => ???, "was active here while called in sick at work" => ???

As for your friends network: see my explanation from two days ago about just how powerful that is for de-anonymization.