Metrics collection should default to off

[LeopoldTal]

Describe the bug

By default, metrics collection is enabled. As a result, game developers are likely to unwittingly violate data collection laws.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Create a simple project, not explicitly enabling or disabling metrics collection
2. Export and publish, e.g. empty project on itch.io
3. Open the Network tab in browser dev tools
4. Run the game
5. Wait 10 seconds
6. A request is POSTed to https://api.gdevelop-app.com/analytics/session

Other details

• GDevelop 5.0.0-beta110 on OS X
• Running game in Firefox on OS X
• The action "Enable (or disable) metrics collection" works as expected.

[LeopoldTal]

Happy to do a spot of work on this, it looks simple enough, but bikeshedding needed: Does this obsolete the 10-second timeout? Or should metrics collection only start 10 seconds after the game is started, to ignore users who open the game but close it without really playing?

[tristanbob]

Happy to do a spot of work on this, it looks simple enough, but bikeshedding needed: Does this obsolete the 10-second timeout? Or should metrics collection only start 10 seconds after the game is started, to ignore users who open the game but close it without really playing?

Based on a quick glance at your link, it does look like the default value is to NOT disable metrics. I agree with you that GDevelop should err on the side of privacy by disabling metrics unless the user has requested them.

[4ian]

As you I'm not a big fan of things that are invading the user privacy. On the other hand, I think analytics/metrics, when anonymous, are essential. Let me explain ;)

GDevelop has since a long time anonymous metrics reported. This is not for tracking users, but for knowing how much GDevelop is used:

• the overall number of users,
• what are the error messages encountered
• what are the tutorials opened the most? Same for examples?
• what are the most used export methods?
• is the asset store used? what are the assets the most used?
• what are the external editors used the most?

See how everything there is centered about understanding the usage of GDevelop.
This is not a "sexy feature", but without this, GDevelop would be dead: I would have stopped working on this years ago, not seeing that dozens of thousands of, often silent, users are using the app every month.
I know this might be disappointing, in an ideal world we would not need this. But it helps understanding the impact and doing the right choices.

I think the same goes for games: having these anonymous analytics built in, and home made, allow me to provide a privacy-focused way to see how a game is performing.
By anonymous, I mean: data minimization (only keep what is needed), anonymized (ip hashed for example) privacy focused (no personal identifiable information, no way to track a user across websites/games).

It's built on the same principles explained here: https://usefathom.com/data - which is GDPR compliant.
Without going into the technical details, only a very small set of information (platform name, ip, etc...) is sent to analytics endpoint. Then information are aggregated (to know the number of sessions per game). Much like the article I linked, there is also a second request that is made to measure the session time (the session itself being a not identifiable random number).
If someone was to steal all the data, they could not tell who has played anything, and even games are identified by a unique number that is random.

All of this to say: I think it's important to keep this activated, because it can help the game creator to understand the game potential, and for GDevelop I can check that we have an ever growing numbers of games having tons of sessions and be sure we're on the right track - all without storing anything private again! ;) This helps understand the impact we all have, and it's essential to continue to grow the GDevelop project.

Of course, I don't want to force things so you can just go and deactivate this (I won't disallow/prevent this), and we should probably do a better job of explaining this in the user interface.
(It's the same deal for the "splashscreen". I ask the community to keep this unless you got a subscription, which helps GDevelop to become sustainable in the future. This is just a check in the user interface - you can very well change your project by yourself and disable it. I hope people don't do that because that's not helping GDevelop).

That's a long rant already haha but I think you got the idea.
I'm happy to make this clearer even if I made everything to make this compliant with privacy laws. I understand that it's a bit disappointing from an idealistic point of view ("it's open source it should be 100% free, sustainable by itself, without any need for any metrics" - the reality is that you need more than that to make the best game engine for everyone in the world) but I really think it's fair and beneficial for the project in the long term to keep this on by default.

[Silver-Streak]

@4ian After some reviewing of the posts on the forums from a few users over the years including some confusion around network calls/required properties,

I think there probably should be a project-level toggle for this for transparency sake, likely in the project properties. Absolutely leave it defaulted to enabled for the reasons you list above, but provide a description of what it collects, what the benefits are, etc.