This past Tuesday Groundspeak announced changes to geocaching.com that included a new stats page. One of the features of the stats page included a listing of your nearest and furthest finds. According to a developer at Groundspeak you only saw the cache ID if you were logged into your own account. It was not clear that other players did not see the cache ID information. This led some premium members chose to turn off their stats page.
In response to the privacy concerns I received this tweet:
@cachemania I just turned the stats off.
I see now that Groundspeak has clarified this issue by adding a note for those two finds. If you log in to your own account you now see this:
As you notice above the logged in users sees the details for the nearest and furthest but other players do not. Other premium members see the following.
It is nice to see that Groundspeak responded quickly to the confusion.
[Note: This post was updated to reflect the actual changes]
teamvoyagr
I have been writing the cachemania blog since 2008. I'm interested in the development of geocaching and the many ways that people play the game.
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5 Comments until now
Actually, the only change was the addition of the red text. The behavior has always been the same since release, but it wasn’t clear that you only saw the waypoint ID for those stats if you were viewing your own. That is now clear.
I’m a little annoyed that Groundspeak decided to automatically include stats as part of your public profile. Assuming that everyone wants their stats publicly available is presumptuous on the part of Groundspeak and could be easily seen as another privacy issue. I don’t care too much for the statistics of the game myself, so why would I want others to be able to analyse my stats.
~TT~
Thanks for the update Nate. Now we know
@TrimblesTrek Once you are logged in you can go here to turn off your stats.
@Teamvoyagr-yes, I had already done that. My point was that the public display of stats should be an opt-in choice…not an opt-out choice.
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