[GD-General] Collecting info from players

[Ivan-Assen I. <as...@ha...>]

Here's an Internet ethics question for you. I don't really
expect to hear a definite answer, more like gather some
of your thoughts.

What info about the player is appropriate for the game to report to a
central server?

There are privacy junkies who would be outraged by the
question itself. These are the people who browse through anonymizers
when they read online comics and daily news.

So their answer is "None" and they would happily flame us, threat to
boycott us and report us to slashdot. (hey, free publicity!)

Our previous title has an update notification system which fetches an
XML file from our webserver once every three days and notifies the user
of patches, maps etc.
This reports to us only the users' IPs. Indirectly, you can translate
this to country code, e.g. by MaxMind's excellent free GeoIP database.

We are considering collecting some info from the users' machine, but we
are somewhat hesitant. What do you think about the following items:

- a unique machine ID, so we can differentiate hits from users behind
firewalls/NATs/whatever

- hardware and OS details - memory, CPU, videocard, version
of Windows, DirectX and drivers
(Daniel Vogel of Epic recently reported such info on this list - how was
it obtained? Was your office torched by a mob of privacy advocates?)

- statistics about how much the game is played - average session, max
session, frequency of running the game etc.

This info can be packed to a 10-15 digits and letters and e.g. added to
the URL request, and later extracted from the web server logfiles. Or it
can be steganographically hidden in clever ways - but do we need to?

I'm sure Microsoft can't get away with anything like this without
creating a major brouhaha, but first, we aren't as well known and hated
as Microsoft, and second, see the publicity remark.

What are your thoughts on this? What are you doing currently? 
Or maybe we should take this discussion to a closed forum ;-)

regards,
Assen