EA's 'Invasion of Privacy' Policy 98
Justus writes "Gamers with Jobs has posted an article covering EA's privacy policy for Xbox Live users. In a nutshell, by using an EA game over Xbox Live, you are automatically creating an 'EA Online' account and granting Electronic Arts the ability to collect your name, address, and credit card information, as well as a variety of demographic information about how you use their products. Not only that, they explicitly say that they may tie these demographics to your personal information — no anonymous aggregation here! When Gamers with Jobs asked EA and Microsoft about these issues, they were met with stony silence, a fact they attribute to the pending release of the new Madden game next week. Without an official comment from the companies involved, it certainly looks like EA has the most invasive privacy policy they could come up with."
Too Few People Affected To Matter (Score:0, Interesting)
The first Xbox only had some 5-7 percent of owners willing to pay Microsoft to play online. The number of paying subscribers must be even smaller this time if they don't want to even mention the number.
In a nutshell, yeah it probably sucks, but who really cares?
Surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your data is worth money. Marketers are willing to buy it. Hence, companies will be willing and eager to sell it. They don't care. They're private companies, beholden to no one except their shareholders.
If you would like to give your explicit approval to this buy buying such a game, or tacit approval by buying any other EA game, then do so. That is your right. Just don't complain when your playing habits are vomited all over the net like so many AOL search results.
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Interesting)
NO PRIVACY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED (Score:3, Interesting)
One more point for Nintendo... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why can't EA learn from Nintendo?
More info on http://www.nintendowifi.com/customersupport/Suppo
Re:Most invasive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not surprising... (Score:4, Interesting)
This, to me, is spyware, and customer data collection needs to be conspicuously disclosed (not buried in an EULA*), and it needs to be opt-in only, by law.
* The most infuriating part is that I read the EULA for CoD/CoD2, and I didn't see anything about them collecting my data and sending it home. They didn't disclose it at all.
Re:It's stories like this one... (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, slashdot has so many readers, we ought to form a PAC for
Re:It's stories like this one... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, my dictionaries don't agree with the wording of your definition, but that's somewhat beside the point. Even using your definitions, how can an inalienable right possibly be removed by a corporation?
If you want to be philosophical about it, then the only rights you truly have are those which are prepared to die defending, because ultimately anything else can be taken from you. We therefore invent modifiers like "legal" (those rights the law says you should have) and "moral" (those rights that someone believes you should have according to their personal ethical standards) to give us more practical concepts of "rights". We can then proceed on the assumption that someone does have the rights they should have according to the relevant authority.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:2, Interesting)
That's just the thing, I run in limited mode and most games install just fine. XP can handle installs on just one user account, even if it's a limited account. The only reason they need those rights is to change the something specific to the OS. (I haven't checked, but DirectX probably shouldn't even require it now, since DX 9 went .NET)
Installations aside, though, CoD/CoD2 can only be played by administrators, too, which is absurd. This was admittedly trivial to fix. Just bad rights assignment by the vendor, not sure if it's intentional or not.
I do owe EA an apology though. CoD is published by Activision, not EA.
Even with a priveliged install, it seems to me you should be able to uses these without requiring a user to have admin rights, once the software is installed. Even if you have to perform certain tasks off limit to a limited account, there are still ways to use interprocess communication to allow a user to perform these actions by proxy.
Agreed. Even supposing Vista shipped with zero vulnerabilities, it can still only do what it's told, and if the software demands access rights, it's up to somebody with authority to tell Vista yes or no. And of course, Activision knows most users will have absolutely no problem with saying it's fine, and then 4c71v1510|\| 0wN3z j00.