PII, system hardware,

Hey folks. Couple of questions for the analytics crew:

Are we allowed to store Personally Identifiable Information (say, a SteamID) on users? This would inform later questions I suppose.

Is there a way to report on and see user hardware? Say, wanting to see how many users are using a certain video card, driver information, CPU model, RAM, etc? Or would this have to be done with CustomEvents - and if so, can you think of an efficient way to do so?

Say I want to know how long a player is taking to complete a level. Is it best practice to set up start and end events and do that analysis in the web panel (and if so how do I go about this), or would it be better to send the duration as a parameter in the level end event?

Edit: Sorry about the mangled title!

 

HI @cowtrix,

Is there a particular reason you are interested in collecting the SteamID? Are you familiar with Analysis Points and how we track them? http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/new-custom-event-limits-please-read.315594/ Since I believe the SteamIDs are a string you will end up using a lot of your Analysis Points tracking them because each unique string sent will use 1 Analysis Point.

As of right now I think your best option to collect system information would be to send the information in Custom Events. You should be able to use SystemInfo, http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SystemInfo.html, to get the information.

I believe it would be best to send the amount of time a player is taking to complete a level by only sending a Custom Event at the end/completion of the level. This way you only get the total amount of time and no superfluous information.

 

The SteamID is a poor example I suppose. It was more a question of the Unity Analytics Terms of Service - for instance, Google Analytics strictly prohibits PII.

As for the other questions - thank you very much! That was pretty much what I had already assumed and implemented.

Although this question is perhaps outside the purpose of this forum - do you know any way on a release build to find out the total RAM usage? That would be a pretty useful statistic to us and there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to get it. We even went down the road of direct DLL calls to the Windows API with no luck.

 

@cowtrix,

Thank you for the clarification, you will be able to use Analytics to collect this information but it is up to the developer to make sure that their privacy policy informs users of the information that they are collecting.

I only know of a way to check for a development build, but I will ask around the team.