New Fortnite Privacy Update Breaks Tracker Leaderboards
A silent setting change in Fortnite’s latest update has made career stats private by default, leaving tracking sites in the dark.
The Great Stats Blackout
For years, Fortnite players have obsessed over their numbers. K/D ratios, win counts, total matches played—it all lived on Fortnite Tracker. But a sudden move by Epic Games has turned the game’s competitive tracking scene upside down.
Following the latest Chapter 7 update, millions of players found their profiles frozen. Leaderboards that once showcased the world’s top talent suddenly looked empty. The culprit wasn’t a database crash or a hacker attack. It was a simple, quiet change in the game’s privacy settings.
Why the Leaderboards Went Dark
Epic Games changed how Fortnite handles player data. Before the update, your career stats were public by default. Third-party sites like Tracker Network (TRN) could easily pull this information using Epic’s API to build global leaderboards and detailed player profiles.
Not anymore. The Chapter 7 patch quietly flipped the switch. Now, the “Share Career Stats” setting defaults to “Off” for everyone. Unless you manually go into your settings and turn it back on, you do not exist to the tracking websites.
The impact was immediate. Famous streamers, competitive pros, and regular grinders disappeared from the rankings overnight. Tracker Network had to post alerts on their website, urging players to change their settings if they wanted their matches recorded.
Privacy vs. Community
Why did Epic Games make this move? The developer hasn’t made a massive public statement about it, but the reasoning is easy to guess. Privacy is a major issue in modern gaming. Epic has faced heavy regulatory pressure over the years regarding how it handles data, especially for younger players.
Making stats private by default protects kids from “stat-shaming” in lobbies. It stops toxic teammates from looking up someone’s profile just to mock their low win rate. In that sense, it is a big win for player safety.
But for the competitive community, it feels like a step backward. Fortnite Tracker is more than just a bragging tool. It is how amateur players get noticed, how tournament organizers verify accounts, and how clans recruit new members. Without reliable public data, the community loses a vital piece of its infrastructure.
How to Make Your Fortnite Stats Public Again
If you want to keep tracking your progress and show up on the global leaderboards, you have to opt back in. Fortunately, the process is simple. Here is how to do it:
- Launch Fortnite and open the main menu.
- Go to the game settings (the gear icon).
- Navigate to the “Account and Privacy” tab on the far right.
- Scroll down to the “Gameplay Privacy” section.
- Find “Show on Career Leaderboard” and toggle it to “On.”
- Apply the changes.
Once you do this, third-party sites will be able to read your match data again. However, any games you played while the setting was turned off might be lost to history. Tracker sites cannot retroactively pull data from periods when your account was set to private.
A Permanent Shift for Fortnite Tracker?
This is not the first time a major game developer has locked down player data. Titles like Overwatch and Valorant have implemented similar private-by-default systems. In those cases, the third-party tracking communities adapted, but they never quite recovered their previous scale. Only a fraction of the player base ever bothers to change default settings.
For Fortnite Tracker, this means their leaderboards may never be truly accurate again. They will only represent a self-selected group of hardcore players who know about the setting. The casual player base, which makes up the vast majority of the community, will remain in the dark.
