We need better consumer privacy laws. It’s mine data, I should get to have a say one how it’s used and who can have it.
Amen to that.
Also, it’s one thing for an application to gather data on their user’s behavior and send that up to the mothership. That sort of telemetry is perfectly fine if it’s opt-in, and distasteful but acceptable if it’s opt-out. And unacceptable if you aren’t allowed to opt out, as in Windows.
It’s another thing entirely to mine data from another competing application on the same system. That’s completely unacceptable behavior, that’s rootkit shit.
Remember how Facebook mined all of that user data and information without explicit consent so they could better target their ads programs? That went well right? People love the Facebook!
That’s a little beyond the pale. Fuck their shitty free games, I’m deleting.
Amen. I believe there is going to be a series of laws and massive customer backlash against companies spying on customers.
Rightfully so. Its bullshit and needs to stop entirely. Even “opt in” like social networks bury in their TOS is bullshit , it just needs to be illegal. Period.
Steam fully complies with GDPR. Here’s their privacy agreement. Equating this to Epic’s sh*** practices is ridiculous.
Why not? How does that make a difference who has my data. They can sell it to anyone they want after they get it.
You win the Sarcasm Award of the Month.
Well done.
Epic fully complies with GDPR.
Again I think Epic needs to be called out for this invasion of privacy and everyone is fully justified by saying “fuck you” and uninstalling it.
If as a side effect it starts the ball rolling on changing Valve’s spying on you then so much the better.
Here’s a fairly balanced video about the Snapshot fiasco. The last part of the video is most relevant.
This is Epic’s privacy policy. I don’t see where they can sneak in collecting information about your Steam friends or Steam game information.
Also, notice this:
Blockquote
Epic does not direct its websites, games, game engines, or applications to children (usually considered to be under the age of 13, depending on the country where you reside).
As opposed to Valve, which says anyone under 13 is not tracked. In other worse, they will track children if you’re from certain countries where they can do it.
It does seem like Epic now complies with GDPR. They didn’t use to.
I’d love to see this substantiated.
What do you mean? You think Steam isnt collecting telemetry on you? They are, just like all game services do*. One small example is literally linked above where some of it is stored on your hardrive.
Again I am not defending Valve or Epic. I want it changed because its a horrible invasion of privacy.
And mobile gaming is even worse fyi, much worse.
*actually I believe Itch & Gog both have ethical privacy policies. While small players I think they should be called out for being pro privacy.
There’s a fairly big difference between collecting data from your own app and spying on data collected by other apps. I don’t think we should be encouraging that kind of behavior.
There’s a lot of links in this thread. Maybe you could be a bit more specific than that?
In general Valve’s approach to this has been pretty good over time. E.g. the Steam Hardware Survey has always been explicitly opt-in.
It’s really very simple - I hate exclusives on an inferior platform. If they want to compete with Steam, fine. But do it with better features or better prices. I hate and resent exclusives.
The reset era link shows where Steam stores some of its local spying data on you.
I strongly disagree Steam has been pretty good. They have been terrible. It was a part of why I was and remain so against SteamSpy. Game customers should be equally horrified that their play data can be stolen by a 3rd party such as Steam spy. And thats just the scrapable data Valve casually leaves lying around. The additional data they track internally is much more detailed and robust.
I really hope that as part of this folks will start to ask what Steam and other games actually track about you when playing games. Its creepy af and absolutely not needed to sell games.
Epic has responded:
We use a tracking pixel (tracking.js) for our Support-A-Creator program so we can pay creators. We also track page statistics.
The launcher sends a hardware survey (CPU, GPU, and the like) at a regular interval as outlined in our privacy policy(see the “Information We Collect or Receive” section). You can find the code here.
The UDP traffic highlighted in this post is a launcher feature for communication with the Unreal Editor. The source of the underlying system is available on github.
The majority of the launcher UI is implemented using web technology that is being rendered by Chromium (which is open source). The root certificate and cookie access mentioned above is a result of normal web browser start up.
The launcher scans your active processes to prevent updating games that are currently running. This information is not sent to Epic.
We only import your Steam friends with your explicit permission. The launcher makes an encrypted local copy of your localconfig.vdf Steam file. However information from this file is only sent to Epic if you choose to import your Steam friends, and then only hashed ids of your friends are sent and no other information from the file.
Epic is controlled by Tim Sweeney. We have lots of external shareholders, none of whom have access to customer data.
Daniel Vogel
VP of Engineering
Epic Games Inc.
Its all well and good. But how about tracking nothing and NOT scanning my machine at all. Its none of Epics goddamn business what games I play or install on my machine or how often or who with. Same goes for Valve. Just stop it.