search

MCModInfo / modinfo

5 stars 0 forks source link

Use a service other than Google Analytics for mod statistics #2

Open MPeti1 opened 4 years ago

MPeti1 commented 4 years ago

Hi!

I appreciate your efforts to respect the players' privacy by only sending data that cannot be used to identify them for you, and that players can opt out of this, but I think you forgot about something. Using a giant advertising company's services for even this little and really useful information makes a very real information leakage. I believe you that nor you, the creators of the library nor the creator of the mod who use this library can identify the users of their mods, but Google still can.

How? Our IP address tells everything: your android phone, the chrome browser, or any other software where you use google services (even if you use Firefox, but the google search, gmail, gdrive, google translate, etc in it) and you're logged in, these all already make your IP address known to Google in real time. And when the mods make a request to submit their data, Google will see that it's coming from the same IP from where in months only the account of techbrew-mc@gmail.com have logged in to Google services with their account, so it's 110% sure that techbrew-mc likes Minecraft, which version do they use, and which mods do they like, when does they play and how frequently. This is a bunch of meaningful data for an advertising company, which can be connected to the actual player of the game through the IP address in the way I explained above.

I suggest you to switch to an other analytical provider, which does not have data available by themselves to connect the players to an identity. I would recommend you to check out Matomo (Piwik), but I've seen people also recommend Countly. As I see they both provide the ability to host open source servers on your hardware if you want, privacy communities are recommending them too, and judging by their pages they can easily do what you need, and even more

techbrew-mc commented 4 years ago

IP addresses are not captured by this mod, and Google would be in violation of international laws to externally correlate the internal anonymous app data with your machine’s IP address.

Since this module only works with Google’s mobile app data analytics, it’s not useful for other analytical systems.

MPeti1 commented 4 years ago

IP addresses are not captured by this mod

This is not what I said

and Google would be in violation of international laws to externally correlate the internal anonymous app data with your machine’s IP address.

Google does not care about that. It's just the cost of business for them, something like an investment

Since this module only works with Google’s mobile app data analytics, it’s not useful for other analytical systems.

I'm not sure if I understand what do you mean by that. If you mean that the data can't be transferred to other analytical systems then please read this

MPeti1 commented 4 years ago

Do you need any kind of analytics at all, if you have abandoned mod development for 6 years?