Response to Recent Community Concerns About Take-Two’s Terms of Service :: Borderlands 2 General Discussions
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“We’re putting cameras in every room of your house, but we pinky promise to only ever look at the feed from the kitchen.”
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My solution? Run Linux. If the game won’t run on Linux because of kernel level anticheat bullshit, DRM, or lack of proton support, refund that shit and never purchase a game from that developer again. If they do data collection, and it still runs on Linux, it is my understanding that all they can gather is what the proton compatibility layer feeds them, which is basically fiction. Proton is already tricking the software into thinking it’s running on windows, and is sandboxed from your bare metal system. Correct me if I’m wrong.
The games I already owned before my time with Linux? Whatever. I’ll take the loss. I’ll probably never play PUBG again and I’m fine with that.
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too much text to just trying to say directly “we don’t collect data”. They are collecting data. A lot.
If they weren’t they wouldn’t need to put it in the ToS
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My solution? Run Linux. If the game won’t run on Linux because of kernel level anticheat bullshit, DRM, or lack of proton support, refund that shit and never purchase a game from that developer again. If they do data collection, and it still runs on Linux, it is my understanding that all they can gather is what the proton compatibility layer feeds them, which is basically fiction. Proton is already tricking the software into thinking it’s running on windows, and is sandboxed from your bare metal system. Correct me if I’m wrong.
The games I already owned before my time with Linux? Whatever. I’ll take the loss. I’ll probably never play PUBG again and I’m fine with that.
By default, Wine/Proton has access to your full Linux filesystem under the virtual
Z:/drive from within the Wine environment, so any dedicated adversary could include your Linux stuff into its data collection. The odds of this already occurring are probably low-ish. You can use bubblewrap raw to start sandboxing resources (e.g. blocking network access or masking directories), or there’s a project called sandwine which presumably auto-configures the important stuff through bubblewrap (though I’ve never gotten around to trying it). Wine itself can also be configured to drop theZ:/drive through itswinecfgtool.Without a dedicated configuration, I’m not sure Wine has any real priority or guarantee about sandboxing your original system from Windows executables, which is also why it’s important to remember that Windows malware can still do damage when running on a Linux system. The malware doesn’t really even have to be aware that it’s running in Wine if it just tries to encrypt any files it can reach.
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“The Privacy Policy identifies the data activities that may be collected but this does not mean that every example is collected in each game or service.”
That’s pretty vague. is this statement supposed to make the community feel better?
“We steal all the data, just not all at once, so it’s okay.”
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By default, Wine/Proton has access to your full Linux filesystem under the virtual
Z:/drive from within the Wine environment, so any dedicated adversary could include your Linux stuff into its data collection. The odds of this already occurring are probably low-ish. You can use bubblewrap raw to start sandboxing resources (e.g. blocking network access or masking directories), or there’s a project called sandwine which presumably auto-configures the important stuff through bubblewrap (though I’ve never gotten around to trying it). Wine itself can also be configured to drop theZ:/drive through itswinecfgtool.Without a dedicated configuration, I’m not sure Wine has any real priority or guarantee about sandboxing your original system from Windows executables, which is also why it’s important to remember that Windows malware can still do damage when running on a Linux system. The malware doesn’t really even have to be aware that it’s running in Wine if it just tries to encrypt any files it can reach.
Thanks for this, I’ll definitely dig in further
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By default, Wine/Proton has access to your full Linux filesystem under the virtual
Z:/drive from within the Wine environment, so any dedicated adversary could include your Linux stuff into its data collection. The odds of this already occurring are probably low-ish. You can use bubblewrap raw to start sandboxing resources (e.g. blocking network access or masking directories), or there’s a project called sandwine which presumably auto-configures the important stuff through bubblewrap (though I’ve never gotten around to trying it). Wine itself can also be configured to drop theZ:/drive through itswinecfgtool.Without a dedicated configuration, I’m not sure Wine has any real priority or guarantee about sandboxing your original system from Windows executables, which is also why it’s important to remember that Windows malware can still do damage when running on a Linux system. The malware doesn’t really even have to be aware that it’s running in Wine if it just tries to encrypt any files it can reach.
This is why I use flatpak Steam. You might trust Valve but do you trust every third party developer?
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We aren’t putting literal Spyware into your computer. We are just putting the functional equivalent of spyware into your computer through your video game.
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“The Privacy Policy identifies the data activities that may be collected but this does not mean that every example is collected in each game or service.”
That’s pretty vague. is this statement supposed to make the community feel better?
That’s exactly how it works with any other privacy policy you will find (except when the service is spun out in a subsidiary like Meta > WhatsApp LLC where WhatsApp has its own privacy policy). Look at Ubisoft’s privacy policy: https://www.ubisoft.com/legal/documents/privacypolicy/en-INTL Ist’s the same. Or worse maybe? They are more clear in their language on why and where the data gets collected. That’s where Take-Two could have done a better Job.
Or EA: https://www.ea.com/legal/privacy-and-cookie-policy?setLocale=en-US
Same shit. Not saying that I like it, but this is not new at all. Take-Two is not a suddenly a spy company that installs spyware. Privacy policies have been like this for years but it seems some people currently woke up to reading or caring about privacy policies for the first time in their life.
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That’s exactly how it works with any other privacy policy you will find (except when the service is spun out in a subsidiary like Meta > WhatsApp LLC where WhatsApp has its own privacy policy). Look at Ubisoft’s privacy policy: https://www.ubisoft.com/legal/documents/privacypolicy/en-INTL Ist’s the same. Or worse maybe? They are more clear in their language on why and where the data gets collected. That’s where Take-Two could have done a better Job.
Or EA: https://www.ea.com/legal/privacy-and-cookie-policy?setLocale=en-US
Same shit. Not saying that I like it, but this is not new at all. Take-Two is not a suddenly a spy company that installs spyware. Privacy policies have been like this for years but it seems some people currently woke up to reading or caring about privacy policies for the first time in their life.
The issue is that the privacy policy changed on an old game people bought long ago, and now they’re not allowed to play the game without agreeing to the changes.
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The issue is that the privacy policy changed on an old game people bought long ago, and now they’re not allowed to play the game without agreeing to the changes.
The privacy policy changed not explicitly for the game. It is possible the data collection behaviour has always been like that and they only now have rewritten it to comply with current laws. The way its written is common to comply with EU law (what in detail may be collected and for what purpose).
Nothing changed for anyone that bought the game and only plays the game exclusively (eg. on Steam).
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too much text to just trying to say directly “we don’t collect data”. They are collecting data. A lot.
What are they collecting? I read the post and nothing really stuck out to me, it’s vague. Sounds like this has been going on for a while, I don’t know the other context.
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Hello, we’d like to address the resoundingly negative feedback from everyone:
- We’re not changing anything, we’re still allowed to install spyware on your computer.
- We don’t care what you think.
- We want to police what mods you install IN A CO-OP GAME.
Thread locked.
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“We’re putting cameras in every room of your house, but we pinky promise to only ever look at the feed from the kitchen.”
More like “we reserved the right to put a camera into every room in your house, but so far we have only done the kitchen.” I mean the probably will do it to all new games they release too.
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When any game changes ToS, the refund window should reset.
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Steams policy to report the post:
“Note: This is ONLY to be used to report spam, advertising, and problematic (harassment, fighting, or rude) posts.”
Could their post fall under problematic? Telling people not to believe information that is in their own terms of service, even though the dev post in the community wouldn’t be legally binding in any way, or provide any protection the the user that this would or upheld in the future.
I’m looking for a reason to report the post. Any ideas welcome.
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“We’re putting cameras in every room of your house, but we pinky promise to only ever look at the feed from the kitchen.”
We don’t necessarily monitor every room all the time.
We won’t tell you what rooms we are monitoring at any one time, just that we reserve the right to monitor every room all the time.
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When any game changes ToS, the refund window should reset.
Steam has actually allowed exactly that in the past. IIRC, they allowed refunds for Helldivers when Sony pulled their PSN account bullshit. You simply can’t use the automated refund process; You need to actually talk to support about it instead.
