Posted on Thursday, August 25 2011 @ 22:32 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Rock Paper Shotgun
reports the EULA of EA's Origin gaming service gives EA quite a lot of rights. It's so broad that it enables the company to scan your hard disk drive and use it to target advertisements to you:
Valve’s policy is self-restricted to anything on your PC directly relating to its own products. EA’s is so broad that it gives the publisher permission to scan your entire hard drive, and report back absolutely anything you may have installed, and indeed when you may use it, and then pass that information on the third parties.
Now, they may well mean for this clause to provide them the same opportunities as Valve’s and others’, intending only to allow information about the use of Origin, and Origin-run software, to be fed back to their sinister super-computers. It could simply be in place to provide a better service for Origin customers. But crucially, that’s absolutely not what you’re agreeing to when you absently click “Agree” during the install. What you’re agreeing to is for EA to have a free pass to scan your PC and gather absolutely anything it wants.
And then even more creepily, they say they intend to take such information, combine it with personal information about you, and use it to advertise directly to you. However, when selling on this free-for-all on your computer’s contents, they’ll at least remove personally identifying information. Gosh, thanks.
