HELLFIRE https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/ubisoft_noyb_complaint/ For anyone who’s ever been frustrated by the need to go online to play a single-player video game, the European privacy specialists at noyb have heard you, and they’ve filed a complaint against Ubisoft in Austria dealing specifically with the issue. Noyb has asked Austrian data protection authorities to investigate the French game studio, which publishes titles in popular series including Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, and others, for violations of article 6(1) of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for forcing players online when a game doesn’t have any online functionality. “Imagine if the Monopoly man sat at your table and took notes every time you want to play a board game with your family or friends,” said noyb (none of your business) data protection lawyer Joakim Söderberg. “Well, that’s the reality of video games … as long as you have an open internet connection when you play, your data is collected and analyzed.” … In this case, the complaint stems from an individual being represented by noyb who became frustrated after being forced to go online to play a copy of Far Cry Primal they purchased on Steam – a game with no multiplayer or online functionality. The unnamed complainant is reportedly a tech-savvy individual, and when examining the data being sent to Ubisoft with the game online they noticed 150 unique DNS packages being sent over the course of just ten minutes. Additional analysis of the captured network traffic revealed that Ubisoft was sending some of the data to servers controlled by Google, Amazon, and US-based cloud analytics firm Datadog. It’s not clear what was being transmitted, per noyb, as the data was all encrypted. … Regards
OmegaWolf747 What better way to harvest our data than while we enjoy ourselves, playing our games, completely unaware?