Game developer discloses hidden data practices

3 replies [Last post]
zangisharp
Offline
Joined: 01/08/2019

Hi all,

I just listened to this video about a game developer who explains how his company harvesting users data and using AI and Machine Learning to study behaviours of users to hook them into buying more stuff in the game(Micro transactions).

I found it interesting and wanted to share with you guys.

The video is pretty lengthy (2h20m) take some popcorn :)

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=loG5_UhgqK4

jxself
Offline
Joined: 09/13/2010

All the more reason to not be using proprietary software.

zangisharp
Offline
Joined: 01/08/2019

I think nowadays it is more complicated and more dangerous whether the software is free or non free because of how the web technologies works. I recently read an article about Web assembly and how it works, basically its like JavaScript, when you call a website you get a binary DLL instead of a JavaScript text file... this makes it more difficult to know what the web site does https://webassembly.org/ (With Javascript text files we could at least see what the code does).

I think programmers have to stop making more "web apps" in the internet and give the users only native desktop apps and must be free software, that way we have total control over the software.
It could be convenient for people to use hosted web apps locally but not over the net(Specially when hosting your apps in an server which you can't control).

The net is cool for sharing information and reaching others in the world, but our work(When you need to do it with a computer ofc) must be done in our own servers.

andermetalsh
Offline
Joined: 01/04/2013

Hello again. Albeit I am not currently using Trisquel, I use Freeslack and OpenBSD (future work, PF understanding and firewalls); and, well, all FSF and FLOSS efforts work ortogonally.

Maybe the BSD community won't be as idealistic as the GNU one. We know we are pragmatic, but, as coming from the OpenBSD world, here, know the dangers of those games and some alien data. That's why some firmware is not shipped by default unless you pkg_add(8) it.

And OFC as some binaries are now pledge(4)'d and unveil(4)'ed, propietary software is being discouraged even from an utilitarian stanza. No pledge(4)/unveil(4) patches, (intrinsic syscall and FS access sandboxing, that's it, you compile it in the binary, is not like AppArmor): no current-world security.

Remember that security now is not just avoiding remote access and exploits: your USER data must be safe from external access, too.

Ironically, that was a reason to cut out the GNU/Linux binary compatibility long ago here, because it was mainly used to run propietary software and often pretty insecure.

Said that, I've seen a referenced video from the OpenBSD gaming channel at Freenode, saying the truth about Games-As-A-Service.

https://invidio.us/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

You may like it, as it's midly related to the post.

Jxself: on propietary software, sadly I still love some IF classics from the 90's for the Z-machine. Spider and Web has the text under a non-free license but you can use the Inform6 game code on external projects.

You could convince the author to release the code under a proper FLOSS license with a ¡ "text artwork" exception.

https://www.eblong.com/zarf/if.html#tangle