Hi Everyone, I was wondering if it's legal to collect player's behavior information anonymously with in a game. For example, if the developer could know how many percentage of player and how much time they would spend on successfully control the main character jump to a certain place to collect a big coin, it could be helpful for the developer to tune the game better according to the behavior of real players. And also, if you implement in-app purchase, to keep the purchase history on customized server might also be helpful if you want to push the downloaded content to player immediately after the app was installed on another device. In this case player might not have to click "Buy" and get the feedback from Apple to tell you the player have already purchased the content before downloading the content. In the game industry, most of the big companies already implemented something similar. But they usually make a long-and-tedious-and-no-one-read-it disclaimer text which containing the data collection behavior somewhere. For small indie developers, we may not have that in our game. So, would that still be "legally" right if the game collects non-personal player behavior anonymously, but provides an option for player to turn off it, without a formal disclaimer?
Jailbroken, I can see what apps connect to the internet. And nearly every app, even extremely simple games or flashlight apps, connects to the developers website. I don't see any problem sending out game statistics like that. The problem becomes when apps send out UDIDs, phone numbers, aurora feint would even upload your entire contact book...
apple used to scan the app for network traffic and if you made a request over the Internet; you would have to inform the user that your application is about to make a connection over the Internet. i was just trying to find the old "rejection" email - but no avail. i think apple may have gone a bit lax on this concept with the introduction of advertising etc.. without a connection; half that stuff doesn't work.
found it.. we were only sending over the UDID and the jailbroken status - what type of "non personal" information are you talking about? UDID is officially, unique and personal
Emm... I guess although UDID itself is not that personal, it could be still considered "personal" in some situation, since it reveals information with the device. I would suggest you sending the hash code (SHA-1 or even CRC32) of the UDID instead of the UDID itself. Nobody can decode the UDID from its hash code. Even somebody else intercepts the hash code in the transmission, they could not do any thing with that. And other "non-personal" information I mentioned was the game progress information, like which level a player was playing, and how much time s/he spent on that, etc. I am really curious about that - how do you know if the device is jailbroken or not?
even hashed; it is still unique well; think about what happens when you jailbreak - look for a specific program (Cydia et al) and you'll be able to know for sure.
