Jump to content

Release Notes (Website: User privacy controls) - March 23, 2022


Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, Geocaching HQ said:

Release Notes (Website: User privacy controls) - March 23, 2022

 

As part of our ongoing commitment to give you more control of your privacy on Geocaching.com, we have added new user privacy controls to the account settings menu. With this release, you will be able to control who sees certain parts of your Geocaching.com profile, including your profile picture, your photo gallery, and your list of finds. Learn more about the new user privacy controls in our Help Center.


Your profile contains all the information about your game play and is a helpful place for other geocachers to see your experience level in the game or get to know you. With these new controls, you’ll be able to decide which details are visible to others when they view your profile. You can change your settings to private, friends only, or leave them public.


In addition, we are making some updates to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Our Privacy Policy is the best place to learn about what information we collect from you and how we use it.


Privacy Policy

  • Formatting and general changes for readability
  • Addition of Nevada Privacy Notice
  • Addition of UK representative contact information
  • Updated information about transfers of data to the US, including clarification that Privacy Shield is no longer a legal mechanism for transfers outside of the EEA
  • Provided more detail about the cookies and analytics providers that we use, including more information about how to withdraw your consent if you are in a jurisdiction that requires this
  • Included references to applicable GDPR articles where relevant
  • Provided greater detail on the ways we use and share your information, including our legal bases for doing so


Terms of Use

  • Updated to include/apply to the Adventure Lab® mobile app
  • General changes for readability


Pooja (onepooja), Product Manager, is watching this thread to answer questions whenever possible.


Any posts in this thread should relate to features in this release. Comments unrelated to the release may be removed. Please direct unrelated comments to other appropriate threads. Thanks!

Oh wow, I look forward to checking this out.

How will these privacy changes affect my Waymarking profile and account?

I realize that someone who is not active will not see this notification and change their privacy settings, but hypothetically speaking it seems it's going to be harder to determine if someone is an active geocacher. This is relevant at times.

Edit: While exploring these settings and my profile, it appears that my Home Location (coordinates) moved to my current location. Was that intentional?

Question: can you explain how this announcement affects the adventure lab? I don't understand. Thanks.

 

 

 

Souvenirs view in Privacy Settings.png

Edited by Max and 99
Link to comment

Soon you'll be able to navigate to a cache page, and just see a sea of 'anonymous user' finds I guess, probably with private logs, images and all..... sounds great.... not. The armchair loggers will love it - just hide your find list and log away!

  • Upvote 3
  • Funny 1
  • Helpful 2
  • Love 2
Link to comment
9 minutes ago, lee737 said:

Soon you'll be able to navigate to a cache page, and just see a sea of 'anonymous user' finds I guess, probably with private logs, images and all..... sounds great.... not. The armchair loggers will love it - just hide your find list and log away!

I'm pretty sure you will still see the name of all finders in the online logs of a cache listing, you will just not be able to easily compile a list of a particular user's finds.

  • Upvote 2
  • Funny 1
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
6 minutes ago, lee737 said:

Soon you'll be able to navigate to a cache page, and just see a sea of 'anonymous user' finds I guess, probably with private logs, images and all..... sounds great.... not. The armchair loggers will love it - just hide your find list and log away!

 

Years ago, people would enter the forums asking about their stats not accurate, and we could help with that "distinct/unique" finds thing...

Once those people realized we all knew they even logged their own caches at maintenance,  they blocked stats from view.

So yeah...  I can see that as well.

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
15 minutes ago, lee737 said:

Soon you'll be able to navigate to a cache page, and just see a sea of 'anonymous user' finds I guess, probably with private logs, images and all..... sounds great.... not. The armchair loggers will love it - just hide your find list and log away!

 

Screenshot_20220323-150121.png

  • Upvote 2
  • Helpful 2
Link to comment
6 minutes ago, ChriBli said:

I'm pretty sure you will still see the name of all finders in the online logs of a cache listing, you will just not be able to easily compile a list of a particular user's finds.

For now.... thin end of the wedge anyone?

Link to comment
36 minutes ago, lee737 said:

For now.... thin end of the wedge anyone?

 

Maybe. The linked Help Centre page says:

 

Quote

At this time, there is no way to block another geocacher from seeing the entirety of your public profile page or your geocaching activity on individual cache pages.

 

I'm with Lee on this, hiding what caches a player has found, and just about everything else about them, takes away any sense of community. We can already see this with ALs where you can't see anywhere what ALs another player has done or even what ALs they own. It's a game played in a vacuum. Maybe it won't matter much if few people change their settings from Public, but if the majority of cachers do it'll pretty much make it an anonymous individualistic pursuit.

 

Actually I'm surprised they're not allowing a player to hide their list of hides, as that's probably a much bigger give-away of where they live than their list of finds. Maybe that'll be in the next iteration.

  • Upvote 1
  • Helpful 2
  • Love 1
Link to comment
39 minutes ago, mustakorppi said:

Does hiding finds also apply to the “found by” and “not found by” search filters?


What about the API? E.g. will challenge checkers work for users whose finds are hidden by privacy controls?

Good questions. Reasonably, it must apply to "found by", otherwise it would be pointless. But what about "not found by"? Could one do such a search over an area of interest, compare the result with a search without that filter and compute the user's find list (partially)?

 

Probably these users can still run challenge checkers. But some of these reveal quite a lot of find history, because they output a list of qualifying finds.

Link to comment
2 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

I'm with Lee on this, hiding what caches a player has found, and just about everything else about them, takes away any sense of community. We can already see this with ALs where you can't see anywhere what ALs another player has done or even what ALs they own. It's a game played in a vacuum. Maybe it won't matter much if few people change their settings from Public, but if the majority of cachers do it'll pretty much make it an anonymous individualistic pursuit.

 

Actually I'm surprised they're not allowing a player to hide their list of hides, as that's probably a much bigger give-away of where they live than their list of finds. Maybe that'll be in the next iteration.

I don't think many people will use this actually. As an example, you can hide your stats at project-gc, but very few cachers do this. I think it will be used primarily by people that have valid reasons not to give away their activity. People that are being stalked, for instance. There is a thread about this somewhere.

 

I was also surprised to find that it is not possible to list or map someone's finds, but it is possible to do both with their hides. Thinking more about this, it probably has little to do with protecting someones home coordinates and more to do with hiding their activity.

  • Love 1
Link to comment

I recently received a Friend Request from another player. I didn't recognize the name, so I clicked their profile. Their home is listed a few states away. OK, maybe I met them at an event. I click to see which Megas they attended, to try to narrow my memory. All I get, instead of the list of over a dozen Megas they attended, is a failed Search results page.  IS THIS A RESULT OF THE NEW PRIVACY SETTINGS or A RESULT OF A NEW FAILED SEARCH BUG?  Either one, there is something not right with the way things are being changed by the developers.

Link to comment
10 minutes ago, A J Pombo said:

... and about the API ... how can i hide my statistics on other sites, like project-gc or cacherstats? Can i "deny" someone to download, via API, my logs and process the data, showing that in a statistics site?

 

That's been available for some time now, via this checkbox under Authorizations in your Profile settings:

 

image.png.adf215082b14002818f6f605bc3dcc4e.png

  • Upvote 1
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
11 minutes ago, K13 said:

I recently received a Friend Request from another player. I didn't recognize the name, so I clicked their profile. Their home is listed a few states away. OK, maybe I met them at an event. I click to see which Megas they attended, to try to narrow my memory. All I get, instead of the list of over a dozen Megas they attended, is a failed Search results page.  IS THIS A RESULT OF THE NEW PRIVACY SETTINGS or A RESULT OF A NEW FAILED SEARCH BUG?  Either one, there is something not right with the way things are being changed by the developers.

This is a result of a new failed search bug. Actually I'm not sure if it is new in the sense not known before. I get the same result when searching for attended megas for a user I know has attended some, but if I remove the filter for mega his other find logs (and maybe the mega attend logs as well) show up. So I know he has not activated the privacy stuff.

Link to comment
Just now, barefootjeff said:

 

That's been available for some time now, via this checkbox under Authorizations in your Profile settings:

 

image.png.adf215082b14002818f6f605bc3dcc4e.png


An important caveat - this is "all or nothing".

If you deny access to API partners, other people can't find you via those services, but you can also not use the services yourself.

  • Upvote 1
  • Funny 1
  • Helpful 3
Link to comment
4 hours ago, Geocaching HQ said:

...including your profile picture, ...

Where is this done? I can't find this option...

List of finds is not available via profile page even when the setting is set to PUBLIC when using FIREFOX! (chrome & edge working fine)
https://www.geocaching.com/p/default.aspx?guid=XXXXXXX&tab=geocaches#profilepanel
This seems a bug caused by this change.

Edited by IDILIO49
Link to comment
7 minutes ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

An important caveat - this is "all or nothing".

If you deny access to API partners, other people can't find you via those services, but you can also not use the services yourself.

Does this also include challenge checkers at project-gc? I followed the "Learn more" link, but it was not crystal clear to me. If it does, then how can a challenge CO check that the requirements are fulfilled?

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
8 minutes ago, ChriBli said:

Does this also include challenge checkers at project-gc? I followed the "Learn more" link, but it was not crystal clear to me. If it does, then how can a challenge CO check that the requirements are fulfilled?

I remember a discussion on this many years ago. IF I remember correctly the CO cannot check the challenge requirements for that user. 

Link to comment
1 minute ago, Max and 99 said:

I remember a discussion on this many years ago. IF I remember correctly the CO cannot check the challenge requirements for that user. 

 

If that's the case, and said user also elects not to show their finds on their profile, the CO won't even be able to manually check their qualification. Is that grounds for deleting their log?

  • Upvote 5
Link to comment
Just now, barefootjeff said:

 

If that's the case, and said user also elects not to show their finds on their profile, the CO won't even be able to manually check their qualification. Is that grounds for deleting their log?

In my opinion, as The Help Center currently stands, no you cannot delete their log. My suggestion was that if you choose not to allow API partners then you should have to prove that you met the requirements, if you want to log a find. It was not met favorably. 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
2 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

 

If that's the case, and said user also elects not to show their finds on their profile, the CO won't even be able to manually check their qualification. Is that grounds for deleting their log?

It should be.

  • Upvote 1
  • Surprised 1
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
9 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

 

I'm having the same trouble using Firefox 98.0.1 on Windows 10. This is what I see now on my profile:

 

image.png.3679b299d326faf0f361eefff88fbdcf.png

 

I can no longer access all my finds or all my hides from there.

I can see all of my finds and hides plus others'. On Chrome. 

Link to comment
9 minutes ago, lee737 said:

Can we please have a setting in the 'privacy settings' to disable the privacy warnings?

 

Yeah, it's pretty in-your-face and this one plastered across the profile background, with the instruction "Review your privacy settings now", implies that having a publicly-viewable profile is a problem that needs to be addressed.

 

image.png.01124599fc6ea7db3b3fd1c4675b7696.png

Link to comment
11 minutes ago, lee737 said:

Can we please have a setting in the 'privacy settings' to disable the privacy warnings?

Yes, seriously. A way to acknowledge, once and for all, that you are aware of this (obvious) fact would be highly desirable.

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
3 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

I'm with Lee on this, hiding what caches a player has found, and just about everything else about them, takes away any sense of community.

I agree this is sad, but I have to concede that GS has no choice. There's a world wide assault going on against any sense of community in modern societies, and I see GS as more of a victim than a perpetrator. "People" -- well, actually their governments -- are demanding exactly what GS is giving them: the freedom to join a community while simultaneously hiding from it, thus undermining the very point of the community.

  • Upvote 5
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
2 minutes ago, dprovan said:

I agree this is sad, but I have to concede that GS has no choice. There's a world wide assault going on against any sense of community in modern societies, and I see GS as more of a victim than a perpetrator. "People" -- well, actually their governments -- are demanding exactly what GS is giving them: the freedom to join a community while simultaneously hiding from it, thus undermining the very point of the community.

 

The thing I still don't get is that there's nothing in a geocaching profile that ties an account to an actual real-life person. There's no real name, address, email address, phone number or anything like that. If someone wants to be anonymous they can easily do that by using a random user name, not providing a location or description in their profile, not posting any photos of themselves with their logs and not attending any events. Allowing them to then hide their activity as well is protecting the privacy of an anonymous entity.

  • Upvote 2
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
7 minutes ago, tbbiker said:

Could we take this a step further and have an option to make our usernames anonymous in our geocaching logs?  After all, there really is no need to have that public as it is a privacy concern.  Maybe you could just make it visible to the CO if that option is enabled.  Also, please make the user photos private in the geocaching logs if the user decides to make their gallery private.  I just noticed that they are still visible even after I made my gallery private.  Finally, please make everything private when the private setting is enabled for geocaches found.  I have mine enabled and I just noticed that people can still see what type of caches I have found.  There is no reason for that as that is another privacy concern so that needs to be included when that private setting is enabled.  Thanks-anonymous

Here's another option - just go bushwalking.

  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
1 hour ago, dprovan said:

I agree this is sad, but I have to concede that GS has no choice. There's a world wide assault going on against any sense of community in modern societies, and I see GS as more of a victim than a perpetrator. "People" -- well, actually their governments -- are demanding exactly what GS is giving them: the freedom to join a community while simultaneously hiding from it, thus undermining the very point of the community.

I do agree that this rubbish is pouring down from government. Although I think HQ has gone too far, especially as this is already an anonymous activity, with users only sharing what they want to share. What is there to gain by hiding your trackables for crying out loud?! or souvenirs? 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
4 minutes ago, tbbiker said:

Or I could just not log my finds.  I'm seriously thinking about that because privacy is no laughing matter in this day and age!

Or - just delete your account altogether, then get a free account/app and just lurk about not logging anything..... you won't even need to sign the logs then either.... 

  • Upvote 2
  • Funny 1
Link to comment
2 hours ago, lee737 said:

I do agree that this rubbish is pouring down from government. Although I think HQ has gone too far, especially as this is already an anonymous activity, with users only sharing what they want to share. What is there to gain by hiding your trackables for crying out loud?! or souvenirs? 

 

Yep. There's a player who's been active in the game for about four years now. His user name is a character from a work of fiction so that doesn't give away much of his real identity, I assume he lives on the Central Coast as that's where his hides are, but his finds, like most of us here, are spread across a couple of hundred kilometres from Sydney to Newcastle. I know what he looks like because I met him once in person and he introduced himself to me, and I know his first name is Will because he signs his messages with that name (although that could be a pseudonym), but that's pretty much all I know about him even though I can see his full list of finds, souvenirs and trackables. I don't know his surname, his phone number, his email address, his Facebook/Twitter/Instagram identity (or even whether he uses any of those), what car he drives or anything else about him. Setting all those things in his profile that are currently Public to Private or Friends Only wouldn't make a scrap of difference to anything I know about him, because none of that comes from his profile.

  • Upvote 3
  • Surprised 1
  • Love 1
Link to comment
13 hours ago, mustakorppi said:

Does hiding finds also apply to the “found by” and “not found by” search filters?


What about the API? E.g. will challenge checkers work for users whose finds are hidden by privacy controls?

 

I guess I can answer this myself then. @Max and 99 has their finds hidden and has opted out from 3rd party access. Filtering a search with  Found by Max and 99 returns 1251 caches. Which is a weird number but I can sort by Last Found date, so it works fine if I wanted to stalk their most recent movements. Logs not accessible via 3rd party tools.

 

@icaunais has their finds hidden but allows 3rd party access. 6447 finds are still accessible via search, and logs can be downloaded with party tools using the API.

 

If this is the intended functionality, I would suggest adding language to reflect that in the privacy controls (so as not to lull anyone with an actual stalker problem into false sense of security).

  • Upvote 3
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
9 hours ago, dprovan said:
12 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

I'm with Lee on this, hiding what caches a player has found, and just about everything else about them, takes away any sense of community.

I agree this is sad, but I have to concede that GS has no choice. There's a world wide assault going on against any sense of community in modern societies, and I see GS as more of a victim than a perpetrator. "People" -- well, actually their governments -- are demanding exactly what GS is giving them: the freedom to join a community while simultaneously hiding from it, thus undermining the very point of the community.

Exactly. What a dissapointing trend. :mad:

Don't know how much GS is overreacting but I strongly object against hiding "Founds" and "Gallery". And "Last Visited" should be repaired instead of removed.

Taking away insight to what caches other cacher are enjoying and what they find interesting in text and picture morphs Geocaching more and more from a community activity to an annoymous played video game.

It is to hope only few will take "advantage" of that possibility to hide away so much of their contributions.

 

I also strongly hope hiding the Gallery is not also hiding the pictures from the Cache-Galleries.

  • Upvote 1
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment

Europe imposes strick laws on privacy and GS has no choice but to comply. Its creating havoc even with the likes of google and meta.

And on another level, I think it is good for someone that has security problems, stalkers or something like that, to be given the choice to continue to play and being at lesser risk.

 

But yes, its a shame to loose part of the good thing gc brings.

  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
1 hour ago, Hynz said:

I also strongly hope hiding the Gallery is not also hiding the pictures from the Cache-Galleries.

https://www.geocaching.com/help/index.php?pg=kb.chapter&id=27&pgid=662#h_10907428117081648019838660

While gallery images will be hidden from your profile with this setting, gallery images are always publicly visible in your logs and the galleries of geocaches and trackables.

  • Helpful 1
Link to comment
13 hours ago, tbbiker said:

Or I could just not log my finds.  I'm seriously thinking about that because privacy is no laughing matter in this day and age!

 

We aren't interested in "competing" or comparing with others, we just like to be outside, so thought similar.   :)

But it's a real pain-in-the-can to keep up with caches you do in future searches w/o logging those you did as found... 

 - We'd probably like to walk the area again, but to head to the same cache you did three years ago... not so much.

Link to comment

Seems (to me) that all this privacy stuff is going to make a lot more people with questions have to go to HQ instead of solved easily here.

Or give up that "privacy", defeating whatever purpose it was meant for, while their question was answered.

A few people asked questions, and I was one that had to say, "I'd like to help, but your stats aren't visible to mere members..."

That'll be two-fold or better now with pretty-much all missing.

 

Maybe it's just me, but I don't get having most of a profile now missing because of "privacy", when the person owns caches...

  • Upvote 2
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment

One (hopefully) good thing we just found was now that last time entered to the website, last caches found, latest trackable, and any other information is gone, maybe folks will have to start using the action logs of DNF, NM, and NA.    :)

No telling whether anybody's active or not anymore...

 

  • Funny 1
  • Helpful 1
Link to comment

  

23 hours ago, mustakorppi said:

What about the API? E.g. will challenge checkers work for users whose finds are hidden by privacy controls?

 

20 hours ago, ChriBli said:

Does this also include challenge checkers at project-gc? I followed the "Learn more" link, but it was not crystal clear to me. If it does, then how can a challenge CO check that the requirements are fulfilled?


The privacy controls do not have any affect on challenge checkers. Project-GC uses the API, it's not looking at your profile.

Opting out of the API means you don't get to run checkers and CO can't run your name either, how you solve the issue with challenges is between you and the CO of the challenge (and HQ if you can't agree on a solution for it). My guess would be that the overlap between people wanting to log challenges and people opting out of the API so they can't use challenge checkers is pretty small. 

Edited by Pleu
Correcting the first quote, accidentally quoted it from ChriBli's post.
  • Funny 1
  • Helpful 3
Link to comment
24 minutes ago, Pleu said:

My guess would be that the overlap between people wanting to log challenges and people opting out of the API so they can't use challenge checkers is pretty small. 

 

Keep that issue in mind anyway, as an additional possibility when a Challenge Checker isn't working for somebody.  Geocachers love to click web site buttons.  It's not always related to what they want the buttons to do.  Plenty of people have selected "This Item Is Collectible" for their Geocoin, and arrive in the Forum surprised that some other player moved it into their Collection.  As just one example.

 

Edited by kunarion
Link to comment
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...