RE: [GD-General] Collecting info from players

[Tom F. <to...@mu...>]

I would _not_ encrypt this data (unless it's a bandwidth hit), and happily
tell them exactly what data you report. Don't _ask_, because by reflex
people say no, which defeats the whole point, but do give them the option to
turn it off if they can bothered to find the option.

So people can disable it if they like, and they can inspect the data
themselves - none of it is particularly privacy-invading, and it's certainly
nothing that playing any other online game (CS, Quake, etc) doesn't reveal.

I belive the Epic data is sent automatically along with the CD key-checking
stuff. Data very similar to what you want to collect is collected and sent
by HalfLife - I think that data has been posted before or is on Valve's
website somewhere. So far, no reports of mobs with blazing pitchforks have
been reported. :-)


Tom Forsyth - Muckyfoot bloke and Microsoft MVP.

This email is the product of your deranged imagination,
and does not in any way imply existence of the author.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ivan-Assen Ivanov [mailto:as...@ha...]
> Sent: 10 July 2003 11:53
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: [GD-General] Collecting info from players
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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