I’m very aware of what Google, Amazon, and the like do. I’m not on Facebook. As explained by someone else previously in the thread, I’m making a decision to trade my data to those companies for value. For example, the value I get from them tracking my location is that I get traffic alerts on my daily commute and get to use Google Maps, which is insanely convenient.
Fair points KevinC. If you like traffic information during a commute, I would suggest Waze over Google Maps, FWIW!
Uh I got news for you. Facebook and a shit ton of companies you have never heard of (Chinese and US) have a ton of information on you without your knowledge or use or consent. Even if we take out maliciousness every website that you visit that has a Facebook like button on it allows Facebook to track you without your consent. They have massive troves of information on you even if you have never entered www.facebook.com in any of your browsers.
Even without the maliciousness aspect of it, ad networks gain a ton of money by out of band correlations. Every time you use your credit card at a physical retailer (without a rewards card) the company is tracking a lot of data about you and tying it to previous times you are visitng that retailer. That data is then being correlated with ad networks (and facebook’s data) to fingerprint you and correlate your walmart physical sales to your visits to cnn.com.
Hell just go to https://amiunique.org/ and you’ll see that without any cookies you can still be tracked among different websites. They can identify you from all different aspects, including how your computer renders an HTML canvas, your user agent string, what fonts you use, what plugins you use, what webgl renderer you use, etc… They can then correlate that once you log into any site and track your real persona everywhere.
And this is being done by a plethora of companies making a ton of money that you will never hear about (it’s only a fluke anyone heard about Cambridge Analytica, they are far from the worst going on here).
So if you think you are only giving data you give consent for only for businesses you gain benefit from, then you are being extremely naive.
The whole notion of privacy right now is pretty fucked, and no amount of regulation is going to fix it, all that will do is just keep the realities of it hidden.
Edit: A great blog post to read about this is Troy Hunt: These Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
Just to clarify, I don’t think it’s wrong to be up and arms about privacy violations, just that I don’t think you should delude yourself into thinking that no one is tracking you without your consent. What Epic did is massively stupid but no one has provided any evidence they were sending back any more information than what they have proclaimed. If you don’t believe them then that’s fine that’s your prerogative but your steam game list is a lot less damning then all of the very very real privacy violations occurring without your knowledge every day, and there’s direct evidence of those happening.
Good post.
Many games for example will track your actions as you play. Things you might not know or want, its all covered in the TOS which nobody ever reads.
One of the more trivial examples I know is dynamic pinch point tuning, used primarily in mobile games.
That is: the game watches you and then adjusts the difficulty based on how you play to make it harder or just plain impossible just as you reach the end of a level, so you would have to re do the whole thing , unless of course you buy that booster.
Now thats not sinister, but I would argue making the game kill the player JUST as they have struggled to the end of a hard level is really crappy , pretty much the opposite of what games should be.
Pinch points come in all varieties some based on aggregate data, some as I say based on live tracking of an individual player.
Thats just one example of how seemingly helpful recording of the player might start out with a good intent “hey we want to make sure we have tuned this game to be fun, so we should remove any really bad levels people get stuck on” but has ended up being used to fleece cash out of the player just as she / he is at their most emotionally vulnerable.
Its what I meant by all this spying on players when playing is just a bad idea, it harms the craft and will erode trust with customers over time as they find out.
Its not illegal (yet) and I cast no shame at colleagues who do this for their games, its quite common after all, but I do suggest that they can do without it if they try.
None of that was news. It doesn’t mean I have to be happy with additional data collection.
To be clear, I’m not mounting an armed insurrection, calling for a boycott, or anything like that. I just don’t like several of Epic’s moves over the past year or so and I’m being beginning to view them as a bit of a scummy company. What Facebook does or doesn’t do isn’t really relevant. I don’t like that company either.
There’s no reason for the Chinese govt to worry about what games a Chinese controlled company produces. They’ll just ban the game from being sold in China. They’d have no problem with a Chinese company making money selling a game to Westerners as long as they can control whether it is sold in China or not.
Except for Tiananmen Square Dance Revolution.
Point taken, you’re right that they wouldn’t want a game denigrating China sold in the west, but I can’t think of many of those off hand.
I don’t have skin in the game cause I don’t really care what launcher I use, and as a software engineer I see other developers do monumentally stupid shit all the time (which is why I find their explanation that an engineer was rushed and thought it was easier for him to just copy the file and parse it believable).
That being said, it’s pretty hilarious at how botched Epic has done this whole thing. They are making a shit ton of money with no indications of that slowing down (let alone stopping). There was absolutely no market forces that compelled them to release the Epic store in the state that it is in or to rush it. They could have released in 6-8 months with more features, a better consumer story, and better polish and been in a much better market position. Nothing was forcing their hands and it was just such a stupid business decision on their part, with the only explanation is they had a lot of hubris from their Fortnite success that they thought they could do no wrong.
In the mean time they showed their hand so now other stores (like Discourse) are lowering their royalty rates to compete which have more potential for winning consumers over.
Or, you know, a game accurately describing China.
For example, Hearts of Iron 4.
Can we just stipulate for the purposes of discussion that no-one on QT3 is deluded about the massive amounts of data that we give over to tech corporations every day, and that it’s possible to give over that data knowingly and still think that what Epic is doing is scummy?
You’re not educating a bunch of rubes here. There’s a material difference between choosing to allow your information to given over and having it scanned from your hard drive by a competing app.
Don’t think anyone was trying to do to that, just pointing out how hypocritical the argument is. I get that people are getting something in return for it with Google in some cases, but it still shows the industry you are ok with it.
Hypocritical is an interesting word to use to describe anyone concerned about privacy based on the fact corporations are increasingly invasive in people’s lives. Are we just supposed to resign ourselves to this fact?
And then to continue down this line of reasoning and say if you are ok with it anywhere you’re therefore telling any other industry you’re ok with it is a bit of a stretch don’t you think?
But…
No invasion of privacy has occurred. The data Epic imports from Steam isn’t transmitted without consent. There has been no invasion of privacy.
In the immortal words of Red Dwarf:
There has been no invasion of privacy Dave
What, even the Epic Launcher?
Dave, no invasion of privacy
Seriously, no invasion of privacy has happened?
No invasion of privacy Dave, there has been no invasion of privacy Dave.
No we can’t because people here are trying to conflate things to ride the FUD train. Do you consider it a privacy violation that Steam scans through your whole active process list on a regular basis to see what programs you are running? You have the exact same amount of proof that valve isn’t sending that data to their servers as you have that Epic is sending over your raw Steam data. Programs are always doing some breach of their sandbox for legitimate reasons (and sometimes legitimate). This is the reason UWP sandboxing is a failure because trying to sandbox every application ends up causing everyone to hate the applications.
So what exactly is the privacy violation? Is it that Epic reads other files on your system that you may or may not have granted access to even though it hasn’t sent that data across the network? Again I guarantee that most applications on your computer are doing something similar without you realizing it (and again, not always for illegitimate reasons).
Is the privacy violation that they are sending the information to their servers without your consent? Not one person has provided proof of this happening.
If we want to be honest here, the only reason we even know this is happening is because Epic was caching the steam data so they could use it only when the user gave consent. If they wanted to hide their data storage they’d just read the file and upload the information right away, instead of holding onto it until the user gave consent.
If Epic is shown to actually have transmitted that data then I’ll get right on the “Epic is a shady as shit company” right on with you. No one has but everyone is trying to make false equivalencies of this to Google and FB tracking, and based on all the evidence presented to me I trust Epic more than Google, FB, and the plethora of other tracking that’s going on in the internet (they have much worse tracking that you can’t opt out of in any capacity).
Consumers are increasingly willing to share their data with companies. Google and Facebook are built on it. Your information is their revenue source. As I said above, if you are ok with them using a lot more intrusive data harvesting because you get something, you aren’t that worried about your privacy. Your price for it is pretty low even. It doesn’t matter what I think, but I find people screaming about privacy from their smartphone to by hypocrites. You’re fine with Google and app markers harvesting everything they can on you, but a game company skimming data about games you bought crosses the line. The apps on your phone stealing far more information, but you still use them.
Not even slightly. Everyone wants data now. Google and FB have showed consumers don’t really care about privacy.
You give the impression of almost reveling in the idea of invasion of privacy?! As I’ve already mentioned previously I use a VPN for PC connection and never signed up to facebook, twitter, etc and don’t use anything by google (not even their phone maps).
So while you’re right most don’t seem bothered at the idea of sharing a near endless stream of information about themselves willingly, not everyone is.
I guess you pick your battles, decide what you’re comfortable with and how far you want to go in stopping this information sharing. I for example do use steam, so it’s not like I’m making a case that I never share information. Just that I’ve gone a fair distance in the direction of trying to limit it. So I find your argument it’s being done a lot presented as a justification for it being done odd.
I am not saying it’s ok, I am saying companies know they can get away with it, because we have shown we’re ok with it. Epic is getting heat in every game community on the internet right now. Their first big exclusive and this will all be forgotten. They know that.