Better read that fine print …
Looking forward to the Halloween release of HellGate: London? Me too. But my enthusiasm – already dampened by the business model for multiplayer – took a significant plunge based on something being discussed in various forums that appeared in the EULA for the recent demo:
3. Consent to Use of Data. You agree that EA, its affiliates, and each Related Party may collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information that identifies your computer, including without limitation your Internet Protocol address, operating system, application software and peripheral hardware, that may be gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, dynamically served content, product support and other services to you, including online play. EA and/or the Related Parties may also use this information in the aggregate and, in a form which does not personally identify you, to improve our products and services and we may share that aggregate data with our third party service providers.
While legal precedent tells us that the stuff in those agreements doesn’t form a true binding contract, this one makes something clear – they *will* be targeting you for ads and other external ‘push’ media based on spyware they install with the system. And people wonder why EA is the most hated name in gaming?
October 20th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Doesn’t Steam do this? WoW too? I remember kerfuffles about both regarding private info and spyware concerns.
Also … don’t you have a GMail address Mike? You’re giving up a lot more information touching anything Google related than dealing with this… I’ve heard tell that your GMail address is tied to your google search info! Yeesh.
It doesn’t bother me so much because I don’t think I believe EA is going to tie this information to actual people and this is a EULA thing that I think, if challenged, would survive court
October 20th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
It is often hard to separate out the reality from the hysteria with this stuff. Steam asks you to participate in hardware surveys, then also asks if you want to submit it. Google, yeah … they are all about targeting you.
As for EA, it is already rumored from the Battlefield games that they will target ads to you based on your browsing habits. To me that says they may have already crossed that line.
October 20th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
I’m not saying it isn’t an alarming trend, sorry if it came off that way. I basically wrote all of that to see how you’d confirm it. And while I do think paranoia is at work with these fears and stories, there’s still a chance this IS the start of something more alarming and we’ll wish we’d tried to stop it sooner. You know, like that whole “frog in the water is boiled to death if heat is applied slowly” thing?
October 20th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
I see the Google thing like some current political rhetoric – we’re willing to give Google much of our hard-fought privacy in exchange for convenience … and like you say, someday we’ll wake up and then it will be too late.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:57 am
Here’s another way to read this: We (EA) are legally covering our rear because we HAVE to collect technical information about your online play in order to properly load-balance our servers. We HAVE to know where–geographically–you’re logging in from and our technicians can do trace routes back to those ISPs so we know how to deal with complaints about lag when they inevitably roll in. The “other services” part is a bit disturbing; but, really, don’t you essentially sign the same type of agreement whenever you register any game?