Im currently working on a free roam fighting game, I would like to ask if its allowed to display user’s country in leaderboards. Something like thier flag, would I get in trouble for revealing thier country or not?
Disclaimer: This is not a legal advice.
I’ve done a brief search in the legal documents and haven’t found any information specifically regarding player’s country. Roblox Community Standards write about sharing person information under chapter Security.
Personal information (PI)
The term is broader and covers information related to an individual, meaning information that can be used to directly identify someone, or information that can help identify a person in combination with other data.
Personally indentifiable information (PII)
The term refers to specific data that is potentially enough to identify someone. Typically such data is quite sensitive (real name, IP location, address, social security numbers, financial information etc.). Mostly the information listed in the Standards.
Country info could be classified as PI. I didn’t find any clause that would explicitly forbid sharing user country.
It’s also important to consider GDRP in EU and other privacy protection laws around the world.
Ethical aspect
I’ll share the preamble (non-binding introduction) into chapter Safety.
We should ask ourselves questions like:
- Would our players feel comfortable and anonymous enough while having this information public?
- Would they want to hide this information?
- Would sharing this information expose them to (additional) discrimination?
After considering those, many developers facing your question decide not to share player’s country, speaking from personal experience and also based on the two topics with voting polls.
| For | Against |
|---|---|
| 34% | 42% |
13% → Roblox should have never provided this API.
11% → Fine if use is restricted to mods and admins.
Total votes: 146
The OP eventually decided against.
Have you ever used a user’s location for your game in any way other users in the server can view it?
| Yes | 2% |
|---|---|
| No | 36% |
| Peronal use only | 8% |
| Didn't know about the feature | 53% |
Note: The percents are floored.
Total votes: 74
On the other hand, a big portion of platforms provide an option to control the public data, including the country name/flag. Personally, I think I’d always expect it.
Argument: Players can simply use a VPN. | Yes, but not everyone knows how to; not everybody can afford one; many prefer a direct connection to avoid higher network latency.
Argument: User’s country is not something to hide. | That’s quite subjective. People have different standards and views on privacy.
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There is a game on the website Country Collectors
(Country Collectors 🌐 - Roblox)
They show players country above the head and their flag, the game hasn’t been taken down but I would not recommend doing that on the leaderboard.
no, I did the same thing in my game Event Room and still didn’t get banned
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