Fetching anything from the internet means some cloud knows what games I'm playing. It's a privacy risk. Games played are very revealing to personality type, and probably lots of other individual info, and that means the temptation to gather this data and sell it to advertisers is very high.
> Fetching anything from the internet means some cloud knows what games I'm playing. It's a privacy risk. Games played are very revealing to personality type, and probably lots of other individual info
It seems like OP already replied with an upcoming feature to entirely eliminate your concern, but I would also point out that this doesn't mean the cloud service knows what games you're playing, they just know what games you have which for many gamers are two very different things.
That's especially true for those with a large enough ROM collection to be interested in tools to manage and simplify access to their libraries. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of potential users have collections that are exponentially larger than the list of games they actually play, in many cases some variety of a "complete" collection.
It is optional. If you don’t configure the integrations it won’t fetch anything from the internet.
It looks much less impressive without cover art though.
Even if we could bypass calling the API directly, just fetching, storing or loading images from IGDB or SSFR would "leak" some data in those calls. In theory you could block the container's access to the web, then identify and upload cover art for every game by hand.
What fortunate timing! Our next release will including a new, local-only "API" that uses Launchbox's GamesDB (https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/) as the metadata source. The entire database is loaded into Redis and games are matched on exact file names, so no data is ever sent to any cloud providers.
https://github.com/rommapp/romm/pull/1515