Affect of new privacy settings on badges, statistics...

Question

Groundspeak released a few new privacy options for geocaching.com like hiding location, hiding souvenirs and hiding the gallery.

Will hiding any part of the profile affect the PGC statistics?

I could imagine if you hide your gallery, PGC will be unable to calculate the shutterbug-badge, or not?

Answer 1

Project-GC uses the API to access your data, it does not look at your profile. Hiding stuff on your profile with the new privacy settings does not affect Project-GC stats in any way, opting out of sharing data with API partners will however affect your Project-GC stats.

Edit: Further testing shows there's one thing that breaks in the API when opting out on the profile and that's souvenirs.

Comments

Thank you :)

Answer 2

There are often more than one way to fetch data. Take finds for example.

Via the API Project-GC can ask for a specific user's finds. It's my understanding that such request will be denied if the relevant privacy setting is enabled. However, there are other api methods to fetch finds for a geocache, in that case it won't be denied. Project-GC uses both methods, where one should still work. But by using the privacy setting that users updates might be slower.

Regarding Gallery Project-GC only fetches that from Geocaches, not from the user's profile. This will probably be uneffected.

For souvenirs, the result of using the Privacy setting will be that the user has zero souvenirs on Project-GC. Affecting Profile stats and Challenge checkers.

Comments

Added comment about souvenirs as well.