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Comment on What level of interest do you have in "empire building" location based games?

my understanding is that games like this have to track your location and store that location history for obvious reasons. I think Pokémon go was bought by Saudi Arabia or something like that, and that made me wary. what is your plan for protecting and anonimizing this data, and are you planning to sell it to third parties?

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douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Great question, and one I’ve struggled with.

I’m a big privacy advocate, and my personal devices and home network reflect that. Which really brings me to a difficult crossroads here.

I don’t have a good answer for you right now, the best I have are the problems I’m trying to balance:

Anticheat: How do detect and build better detection for location spoofing? This, intrinsically, requires the recording of directly associated location data. How can I balance this against privacy concerns?

This is the toughest one here. Likely I’ll need a combination of data retention periods and anonymization. At the very least sensitive data is separated from the rest of the game data, and is encrypted at rest. Likely there are clever protocols and solutions already out there I just don’t know about yet that can improve protections here.

Audit Logs: When a player performs an action that interacts with a location-based feature, where they where when that action was performed it is stored alongside the audit log of that action. This ties in closely with Anticheat, and also enables pattern matching to try and find oddities (exploits, cheating, bugs, and other problems).

Right now these stay around forever, and can be used to simulate the global game state at any point in the past (really REALLY useful for debugging problems, especially when you don’t have a good repro). Eventually such state should make granular rollbacks possible in case of exploits or rampant cheating. (A game where you have to physically go somewhere to capture a mine means rollbacks have a crazy high cost, making them granular is pretty important)

Analytics and Telemetry: Location data isn’t in use here right now. And I don’t see how it would be while also respecting privacy.

Selling the data: 😂😂😂 I’d rather light my servers on fire than stoop to that level.
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