Hi,
Up until today I have been playing The Witcher 3.
I have installed the game some months ago by downloading it from my browser, and then I never logged into gog.com again.
Also, I have never used gog Galaxy.

Today I swapped out my HD for a new one, and therefore I had to install the game again.
I wanted to try gog Galaxy, since it seems a great program, and I was particularly impressed by the effort they seem to put to protect the user's privacy. All in the website of gog Galaxy tells you "we will do this, but only if you let us" - "you can always choose what to use and what not", etc...
This, to me, looked like a great thing from gog, so I decided to give gog Galaxy a try.

I was a "bit" surprised to notice that when I installed Galaxy and logged in, in my library The Witcher 3 was listed with all the achievements I have earned in game, and also my play time!

I have never used Galaxy before, and in the game you are not required to log-in into your gog.com account... actually, the game is not at all an online game.
Since the HD is a new one, I don't have any gamesaves in the folder, and I didn't back them up (yet) from my old HD.
So... How were these info collected? And how were they linked to my account even though I never used Galaxy while playing, and downloaded the game from the website?

Edit: Nevermind. I misread.

Hmm, he did mention that he has no savegames on his new HD. So it`s really an interesting question.

That's really strange and shouldn't be possible. Are you maybe using stuff like OneDrive that syncs Windows accounts between different machines?

When I started Witcher 3 through the exe instead of Galaxy my game time was not tracked at all (on the same computer). Don't know about achievements, they all have been a little glitchy for me - Galaxy even gave me the "Passed the Trial" achievement although I've not yet finished the game.

Oh right... I didn't notice. :/

No, I don't think this is the case, as I have written I don't have any save file in the folder (they are still in the old HD which is disconnected from my pc right now).
It seems like when you download the game, even from the website, your account gets registered somewhere in the game files, and the game automatically sends info to gog.com, even though it is not an online game, requires log-in, or anything...

It all depends where the game saves are... if they are in your documents folder (or your user folder, whatever Windows calls it these days) was that on the hard drive that was removed?
I know games these days save files all over the place, so just because you've changed your hard drive (assuming it's not the one and only hard drive in the computer) it may be possible a save file was lingering around somewhere.

Yes I do have OneDrive or Dropbox, but the game was installed in a folder that is not tracked by either of those services Yes, gamesaves were saved in the "documents" folder in a separate HD (D:\), but when I got the new C:\, I also erased D:\ with a deep-format.

The documents folder on D:\ was not tracked by OneDrive or similars

Or may be Gog galaxy does save TW3 achievements online.

Just checked. There is no firewall rule for Witcher 3, at least on my machine, so it shouldn't be able to send data anywhere. Are you sure? Per default OneDrive syncs the Documents folder. Regardless where you put it.

Hm, very strange. Where are Fox Mulder and Dana Scully when you need them?
But to be serious, I would really like to know how this is possible. If there is really no chance that some data has gone from one drive to the other then this is a little bit scary.

It does, if you are logged in. But the OP stated they were not running Galaxy.

Well, he didn``t use or have Galaxy when he was playing W3 with his old HD.

I guess someone is starting WireShark and witcher3.exe right now...

Well I reinstalled a couple of weeks ago and everything was completely gone.
Which happens every time I uninstall a game.
So I guess you're.. lucky?