It’s been brought to my attention that people who are logging in with Google are now being asked to surrender their contacts. To be 100% clear: We are not spamming your friends! This is a bit of a misunderstanding, and we’re working to clear it up. Read on if you want more details.
We use a service called RPX (aka. JanRain Engage) to enable 3rd party login support. That’s why a couple months back we went from offering OpenID only login to offering Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all the others. RPX allows us to be largely ignorant of the underlying details. That’s a good thing, as we spend more time coding cool RPG-related features, and less time dealing with figuring out how to log you in.
Anyways, the 3rd party providers are constantly changing, especially Facebook. It seems like every week they come out with a change to their system that requires us to change something on our end. Luckily, RPX shields us from much of that. However, recently, Google made an update, and when we changed our settings to match, it started asking for people’s contacts as a requirement for logging in. We don’t need this information, we don’t want it, and we don’t use it. Unfortunately, we can’t figure out yet how to turn it off. We’ve emailed the RPX support, and we’ll just have to wait and see what they say.
Until then, please trust that we’re not up to anything nefarious. We respect your privacy and the privacy of your friends. The last thing we want is a reputation for spamming.
