Dismiss Notice
How Does This Work?

You create a free account and set a Gmail filter to forward your Ingress email damage reports.

The damage reports are processed in realtime into the Outgress analytics and alerting engine.

That's the short version.

Is This Allowed?

We believe so, but you decide.

But My Secret Data!

No one on the opposing faction cares who on their team is attacking you. Do you care who on your team is attacking opposing portals?

Removal of "Hours Of Play" view

Discussion in 'Feature Requests' started by batteryAClD, Sep 23, 2017.

  1. batteryAClD

    batteryAClD New Member Enlightened L16

    Would you consider killing off the "Hours Of Play" feature?

    It is interesting data, but it's also one of those features that feels "creepy" to people when they first learn about Outgress and look themselves up. I personally have not found it very useful, but of course I may be in the minority. The data would be much more useful / actionable if the Hours Of Play and Area Of Play features were linked. I can think of at least one way to do that in a very useful way. BUT in my opinion that level of activity tracking could (and inevitably would) actually be used for stalking, and I am not advocating such a feature. So as it stands now, I fail to see the benefit of the Hours Of Play feature, aside from a "look at this neat trick that we can do with the data." Granted, it is really cool from that data geek perspective. :)

    The reason I'm proposing its removal is that it is being abused. Twice in the past 3 months (that I know of), the Hours Of Play view has been used to try to get Ingress players "in trouble" with their employers / family.
    The most recent example: https://plus.google.com/+joseapontejr/posts/ahCcX3teDA7
    While this type of activity is clearly inappropriate, and the fault lies with the person who is doing the "tattling", it's disappointing that Outgress data is being used as a weapon to cross the line between game life and real life.

    More gory details about the fallout from the abuse of this data:
    https://plus.google.com/+WilHutton/posts/Xvcy3iuHnWE

    Thanks for the consideration,
    Matt
     
    batteryAClD, Sep 23, 2017
    #1
  2. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    While I'm the first to agree that's pretty idiotic and the Ingress player who tried to pull that crap should be permanently banned, I'm not sure removal of the Hours of Play really would solve anything in this case. The Hours of Play goes back 6 months... so it's kind of an invalid tool for such an argument unless the user has never had a day off or went to the dentist/doctor, etc. But more importantly, it's not even a good way to try and get someone in trouble based on their whereabouts and actions. The normal Ingress Intel map is better at that because it tells you the actual day, location, address, etc. of where someone was. So whoever is trying to get people in trouble with the "Hours of Play" tab isn't that bright to begin with.

    On a side note, the Hours of Play *is* more than an interesting trick. We use it around here quite often to see when we might not come up against opposition in certain areas. And it intentionally doesn't correlate time with location just because it's intent is to NOT be a stalker tool.
     
    digitalpoint, Sep 24, 2017
    #2
    Ranger81 likes this.