Ubisoft faces fine of £79 million due to secret data harvesting. May scrap online connections for single player games.
- Thread starter DryvBy
- Start date
Fbh
Member
Hey, they need their random trivia info to try and make their games seem successfull when they are underperforming.
"Hey Ubisoft how much did your latest game sell"
"Did you know that if you got a burrito for every guard that players have killed in our latest game you'd have enough burritos to feed the Icelandic town o Garðabær for 2 weeks?"
"...ok, but how did the game sell?"
"During the first 24 hours, Ps5 players earned 5000X as many trophies as the underwater hockey federation has given out in their 50 years of existence"
"...yeah but the sales?"
"Players have walked enough steps to walk through an entire IKEA store 2 billion times!!!"
kruis
Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Ubisoft Faces £79m Fine for Spying on Gamers in Assassin's Creed
Privacy experts slam Ubisoft for harvesting player data without consent in Assassin's Creed Shadows. A $104 million fine looms—will gamers finally get justice?www.ibtimes.co.uk
The author of that article is jumping to so many conclusion he may as well particulate in the next Summer Olympic in the US.
All that we know of now is that:
a) a privacy watchdog Noyb has accused Ubisoft of illegally harvesting player data without consent.
b) that privacy watchdog group filed a complaint with Austria's data protection authority on April 24th
c) the maximum fine for a conviction could be 92 million euro based on Ubisoft's turnover
That's all there is.
But Noyb has no actual proof whatsoever that Ubisoft is spying on their players or stealing user data, all they know is that "over a period of just 10 minutes, the game established a connection to external servers 150 times. Among the recipients of the complainant's data: Google, Amazon and US software company Datadog."
But Google and Amazon are two of the biggest cloud server hosters in the world, that's with 99.99% certainty where Ubisoft servers are hosted and Datadog creates software to monitor "the health and performance of your underlying infrastructure, supporting services, and applications" (ie the Ubisoft uses Datadog to let the either Ubisoft Connect smoothly switch to different servers if one part of the server infrastructure is down.)
The worst things that Noyb actually accuses Ubisoft of is "Among other things, the company collects data about when you start a game, for how long you play it and when you close it. "
OMG!!
Noyb could be right! When I save a game, it does indeed say how long I've been playing! What's even worse, that data is stored on a cloud server so I can continue playing a single player game I bought on a different PC or even on a Playstation 5 or Xbox if I bought the game for that platform too! Those sneaky French bastards!! This is outrageous! Disgusting! Completely against the law!!!
DryvBy
Member
kruis
Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
What I don't fucking understand is why these privacy watchdog are so focused on unimportant data gathering shit (OMG Ubisoft knows how long I play a game!!!) and they're not interested in going after the much more important issue that BigTech or Big Gaming can terminate our digital accounts at any time without giving us any possibility to fight that decision or even telling us what we might have done.
MrCunningham
Member
Jokes on them!... I haven't purchased a UBiSOFT game since like FarCry 4...
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Omnipunctual Godot
Member
Let's be real. They'll probably just make you agree to a 10-page EULA to play the game you just bought."Ubisoft may be forced to overhaul its data practices and scrap mandatory online connections for single-player titles."
Hopefully this is the end of this absolute Bollocks
Durin
Member
Given all the success of handhelds like the Switch, Steam Deck (other PC makers), and Sony + Microsoft likely jumping in to the fray it just makes sense to remove the online connection. It absolutely blows to need a connection when you're on the go, and some games have already removed this just to sell more units on the Deck (Activision with Tony Hawk 1-2 Remake).
Couple that with governments inevitably cracking down on data gathering just because of AI, digital privacy rights are gonna be another thing that matter in the next 10 years.
Couple that with governments inevitably cracking down on data gathering just because of AI, digital privacy rights are gonna be another thing that matter in the next 10 years.
ZoukGalaxy
Member
Back in time I bought STEEP on PS4, physical, because I wanted a game to decompress and it looked so cool and atmospheric, I wanted to play ALONE and offline, I don't want to play with people or compare my times for this or that because I don't give a single shit... just to discover that it's possible ONLY if you go online first to update the game to be able to play offline (it was not possible at launch but some communities pushed them to modify that)
So they finally "added it", and as a punishment, here how it works: when you play OFFLINE you have now a PERMANENT DISCTRACTING YELLOW/ORANGE NOTICE ON SCREEN telling you are offline ALL THE TIME.
There is no way to remove it except to go online. I was totally disgusted by this practice.
I have no polite words about my feelings on this practice which sound like a harsh punishment for wanting to stay offline to play alone.
UBISOFT, please just close for ever and sell all your licences
Oh, and I finally never played the game after discovering what they did.
Fuck You UBISHIT.
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Ritsumei2020
Banned
I swear one of these days the news will be like 'Ubisoft harvesting children's organs' or something.
I am not surprised anymore by anything Ubisoft would do.
I am not surprised anymore by anything Ubisoft would do.
Dr.Morris79
Gold Member
They do most of the time anyway
Just look at the shite Bamco makes you not pay attention to before you click yes..
Because we want that phat, phat world!
Audiophile
Member
Hawk The Slayer
Member
Makes no difference to me if they go bankrupt since I don't like anything from them besides Far Cry Blood Dragon.
Simpdimples
Member
yay! they could use this info to find the most appropriate booster pack to sell me!
San Dan Glokta
Member
So 79mill pounds are equal to how many sold copies of AC: Shadows' revenue now being lost?
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Fun fact Arby's has more revenue than ubisoft 4.5 billion usd vs 2.5 billion euros, so the lesson is you're better offer making roast beef sandwiches
LavitzSlambert
Member
Sounds good to me. I always start their games without an internet connection to skip their account bullshit. This will just make it easier.
The Cockatrice
I'm retarded?
As long as this gets rid of their scummy mtx in their singleplayer games Im fine. Wanting them to shut down is stupid though.
JohnnyFootball
GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
Ubisoft Connect (UC) is the main culprit when it comes to ruining my Windows 11 Home theater keyboard-less home theater experience.
I let it boot into Steam Big Picture, UC is an attention whore that constantly produces "Do you want to allow this device to make changes?" UAC message.
I let it boot into Steam Big Picture, UC is an attention whore that constantly produces "Do you want to allow this device to make changes?" UAC message.
PlayStaytion
Member
Being jealous on how we spend our precious time? It's precious anyway and Ubisoft can't change that.
It's precious anyway and Ubisoft can't change that.
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TerribleAtThisGame
Member
Most companies this fucking big deserve a good bop on the head once in a while as a reminder that they can't act with impunity at all times.
wvnative
Member
It's hard to pirate ubisoft games that force an online connection.
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