Grepodata is a scam

kingpg28

Phrourach
So i heard from @-Lady Godiva- that in order for Grepodata to be approved it has to get rid of "Heatmaps", but i did some research on February 16th of 2021 big man baudin said this:

1623604845372.png

then i heard it breaches GDPR rules... when in reality it doesnt, because if it did then GRCT should breach it too since it tracks in game activity such as grepodata... and it had been approved for over 8 years or something. so in reality LG got mad in WC and decided that he will pick and choose who can use that feature... i.e him and anyone he is friends with... script is useless tbh its only used for the heatmap but now its gone... like who cares about daily rankings etc... see what happens when players design scripts and get mad... they become stingy with it

So in conclusion LG lied about removing it to get it approved for use.. even though people has been using for years and not a single person has been banned for it. and so now it is a select few of people who can use it.. @Baudin Toolan @Hydna this is unfair player biased so we should just make the script illegal for all since it only provides a advantage for some and not all.. it is in the same category as a bot
 

kingpg28

Phrourach
there is no one from inno saying it is illegal, that is what lg said cause he was getting bullied in wc and took the feature off
 

kingpg28

Phrourach
your missing the point... they are not approving scripts... they stopped that process on all markets, the reason it was removed was for personal use not for privacy concerns...
 

Reimu Hakurei

Chiliarch
kind of a yikes if true, but its not really a script. the heatmap feature is website / discord bot thing, grepodata is great for city indexer for all players... there is no reason for it to be made illegal, making it illegal wouldnt solve anything because the heatmap is a feature of the website.
 

MasterSpy

Chiliarch
So i heard from @-Lady Godiva- that in order for Grepodata to be approved it has to get rid of "Heatmaps", but i did some research on February 16th of 2021 big man baudin said this:

View attachment 15528

then i heard it breaches GDPR rules... when in reality it doesnt, because if it did then GRCT should breach it too since it tracks in game activity such as grepodata... and it had been approved for over 8 years or something. so in reality LG got mad in WC and decided that he will pick and choose who can use that feature... i.e him and anyone he is friends with... script is useless tbh its only used for the heatmap but now its gone... like who cares about daily rankings etc... see what happens when players design scripts and get mad... they become stingy with it

So in conclusion LG lied about removing it to get it approved for use.. even though people has been using for years and not a single person has been banned for it. and so now it is a select few of people who can use it.. @Baudin Toolan @Hydna this is unfair player biased so we should just make the script illegal for all since it only provides a advantage for some and not all.. it is in the same category as a bot
cry me a river
 

Hydna

Grepolis Team
Just to be clear here. This script is approved and it is available to all. It is a third party script so the support team are not responsible for issues but you are welcome to raise a ticket if for some reason you are unable to access it.
 

DeletedUser41523

Guest
"due to privacy concerns"
IE. we had to or else we wouldn't be approved
View attachment 15530

Gonna be honest...I pretty much never used the heatmap. But I would throw money down that LG’s teams will always be able to use the Heatmap.

My guess is that they just don’t like getting hit in their offline times. Which happens a lot when your team is 99% comprised of people who will only attack you when your heatmap says that your off. That very quickly becomes a two way street. A lot didn’t seem to appreciate it being done back.

Just my opinion on the matter.
 

DeletedUser56448

Guest
I appreciate the enthusiasm here in this thread, but as the main developer of grepodata I must say that this is a very baseless accusation. Where is the evidence?

Yes we removed the heatmap, and yes we did so to get approval for our userscript. Maybe they don't look at new scripts anymore, but made an exception for this one? after all, a lot of people use it.. All I know is that we were asked to make some changes to get approval, we made the changes and then we got the approval. It is as simple as that.

The reason that the heatmap was removed was that it was an aggregation of player online times. The key word here being aggregation. We were the only website that was doing that kind of aggregation, and honestly it is a grey area in GDPR. I am not a lawyer but at the same time if INNO asks me to remove the feature then I will, no questions asked. We (grepodata, but also other sites) can still show a players last online time because that is not an aggregation and does not disclose private information for which the users did not give us permission to collect and display.

Long story short, we removed the heatmap from our codebase entirely! Nobody has access to that data anymore. In fact, our hourly scripts don't even calculate the heatmap values anymore. If you can read code, you can verify this because our project is 100% open source: https://github.com/GrepoDataTools. I invite all developers here to take a look and see for yourself. The accusation that some people can still see the old heatmaps is simply impossible.

That being said, if some other site has replicated the heatmaps, we are not responsible for that and we have no affiliation with them.
 

Aicy

Strategos
I don't understand why is aggregation of player online times worse? Surely it's more anonymous and better from a GDPR perspective?

I thought GDPR was about protecting personal and targeted data, and it doesn't care about aggregated data as much?
 

DeletedUser56448

Guest
I don't understand why is aggregation of player online times worse? Surely it's more anonymous and better from a GDPR perspective?

I thought GDPR was about protecting personal and targeted data, and it doesn't care about aggregated data as much?

By clustering the attack points into the hours of the day, you expose additional information about a player that is not published in the attack points endpoint itself. If you just look at that endpoint at a moment in time, all you will see is the attack points of a player, which is totally harmless of course. But because we were pulling that data every hour and tracking the differences per player, we were adding a dimension to the data (time) that was not intended by the developers.

As I said, the issue is not directly with GDPR, but more that they are not comfortable with third party sites showing that kind of time-aggregated data.
 

Shuri2060

Strategos
So i heard from @-Lady Godiva- that in order for Grepodata to be approved it has to get rid of "Heatmaps", but i did some research on February 16th of 2021 big man baudin said this:

View attachment 15528

then i heard it breaches GDPR rules... when in reality it doesnt, because if it did then GRCT should breach it too since it tracks in game activity such as grepodata... and it had been approved for over 8 years or something. so in reality LG got mad in WC and decided that he will pick and choose who can use that feature... i.e him and anyone he is friends with... script is useless tbh its only used for the heatmap but now its gone... like who cares about daily rankings etc... see what happens when players design scripts and get mad... they become stingy with it

So in conclusion LG lied about removing it to get it approved for use.. even though people has been using for years and not a single person has been banned for it. and so now it is a select few of people who can use it.. @Baudin Toolan @Hydna this is unfair player biased so we should just make the script illegal for all since it only provides a advantage for some and not all.. it is in the same category as a bot
Late to the party, but you miss the point PG. The player data has always been publicly provided by Grepolis' API, you only needed to know where to look. That means anyone with the skills could create a heatmap for themselves. Grepodata wasn't the first website to do so or to make it publicly available (and unlikely the last).

It's not their fault if they had to remove it in order to get the script approved, if Innogames believes the heatmap breaches GDPR. And if you look at the timing of the script's approval, it coincides with the Heatmap removal, despite the website/script existing for much longer.

I have no clue if LG and friends continue to use a private version of the heatmap, but even if they did, they're perfectly within their rights to do so, because they are utilizing data which has always been publicly available. You are free to do it yourself as well, you know.

Just count yourself lucky someone was kind enough to create such a thing and host it publicly for the last few years before they had to remove it. They could've chosen not to share - ik many out there wouldn't. There likely has existed private and more advanced versions of the heatmap between some groups of players for many years that you just don't know about.
 
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