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Based on the article text, it’s only citing things like how long you play. I thought most games collected telemetry like this?
Don’t get me wrong, if it was scanning your drive to sell data to harvesters, I’d be extremely unnerved. And you should definitely be able to turn this off. But I feel like even Valve has recorded things like “60% of players quit after losing to this boss”
Based on the article text, it’s only citing things like how long you play. I thought most games collected telemetry like this?
A commonplace travesty is still a travesty and metadata is still data. If my hairdresser asked me "Hey, in addition to me cutting your hair and you giving me money I'd also like you to constantly keep me updated on your sleep schedule, your vacation plans, marital status changes and the myriad of other things that can be directly gleaned from aggregate timeline data - all the other hairdressers have started doing it as well!", I'd likely look at them incredulously for a few seconds while silently imagining stabbing them with their own scissors.
Calling it "telemetry" has somehow normalized it over the past decades, I suppose? I just don't understand how anyone could ever accept this as normal.
That's the thing, though. I respect the analogy, but the equivalent here would be if the game was also checking your drive for other games, for financial apps, scanning your browser's cookies to see which sites you visit, etc.
If, while playing a singleplayer game, they're recording what actions you take within that singleplayer game, it's understandable some people wouldn't even want that - but I also don't see that as nearly so invasive as other data travesties. Worse, highlighting it here feels like a "cry wolf" situation where you'd desensitize people to the most harmful privacy breaches.
I’m sorry, but that’s a terrible analogy. In the gaming scenario, Ubisoft is collecting the data on their own product usage, your hairdresser analogy is going outside of the service that the hairdresser is providing.
It sounds more like the hairdresser writes down how many brunettes they've had as customers that week, or which styles are most requested.
This is what people usually mean these days when they talk about spyware. Not actually spyware, but counting how many hours you play each game or checking how long you refuse to update windows for.
But if you call it spyware you can write an article or fight on the internet.
I also wouldn't consider this a secret....
I found years ago that if you block ubi.com and ubisoft.com (if you have a self hosted DNS or a way to block domains on a network), and any other sub domains you might spot, the games work fine. They just take like a full minute to load while they try their best to hit the servers. So yeah I've never agreed to the TOS for a few games as a result.
Needles to say, you'll need these domains unblocked to play multiplayer.
I really don't think it was that secret. Every modern Ubisoft game I've played has had multiple unskippable TOS checkboxes that you had to agree to before you can even pass the title screen, which state in no uncertain terms that they're going to datamine the shit out of your entire play session.
It is still nice to see this stuff being challenged, though, even though I'm doubtful that it'll bring about any meaningful change.
And that's a big reason why I don't buy Ubisoft games. Even the old Ezio trilogy has that crap.
So yeah, no more.
Yeah, I remember noting this when I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey for the first time.
I'd kind of like Steam to have the ability to indicate games that can run offline in its Store and enforce this by running the game in a container without network access.
I run all my games in Linux and everything but Steam goes via Lutris which I configured to, by default, launch them inside a Firejail sandbox with no network access (plus a bunch of other security related limitations) something which I can override for specific games if needed.
It's interesting that Steam games are actually the least secure to run in Linux and with a configuration as I have it's literally safer to run pirated shit downloaded from the Internet than Steam games.
You know that's not too unreasonable thinking about it, I'm pretty sure their proton setup works in a similar way
Yes please!
One step forward getting an offline version of the Crew, and another step back losing privacy