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!!!