PC Games Have Built In Spyware?

Jon855 said:
This would seem like an interesting article to write about regarding the Red Shell as a company and what they do and how they help the developers whether if at customers' benefit or not. And from your description of it "being rolled out a bit ore nefarious than it is" seems to speak volume and in some aspect - how does this differ from tracking cookies?
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This exactly what I found when I went to separate the wheat from the chaff. I could not find any evidence of anything "ugly" going on beyond a normal cookie for advertising etc. The data that RedShell looks to be using is anonymized and is basically a 3rd party tracking service for the dev that made the game. You can put your tinfoil hat on and go nuts about it, but I did not find anything that was shitty about it, outside of the fact that they opt you in on this without your knowledge. THAT PART IS SHIT. But the bottom line is that this is something the devs wanted in their own games so they could have a company analyze the data and report on it about their game, because they did not have the resources in house to do it themselves.....which I would guess goes on in most higher profile games. Till I see evidence of otherwise of what I laid out above, I think it is a non-issue outside of the opt-in. But do keep in mind, that the devs use redshell to help analyze and make games that people like more. That's my 2 cents, you may need change. Otherwise it all seems to be outrage du jour.
 
Makaveli@BETA said:
I have quake installed also.

where do I find the info on what to block?
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It's linked on the page linked here. I can't seem to post it in here for some reason.

Edit: At any rate, just put the following in your hosts file (open notepad as admin and open C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts):

0.0.0.0 redshell.io
0.0.0.0 api.redshell.io
0.0.0.0 treasuredata.com
0.0.0.0 in.treasuredata.com
 
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Thanks for the Quake info. I’ve been playing it a bit. Still, I’m not all that worried. I’ve been sold about a million times over I expect by now. I’ll wait and see what happens. If it’s still in Quake later, maybe I’ll block it.
 
Sorry, not for this but I don't trust anyone with a ponytail or pyubs for facial hair.
 
greenman said:
What you watch and what you play.. A profile is build off of those two major things predicting what you are likely to watch or play, when, how, what your life is like, what category of people you fit into, etc. Also if you search, what you search for..

Or was this some sort of rhetorical statement?
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Hardly the same as getting access to your full browsing history, bank accounts, personal files etc.
 
B00nie said:
Hardly the same as getting access to your full browsing history, bank accounts, personal files etc.
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Well, you're not wrong. The thing is, there's not necessarily a limit on data analysis. Even without a name/address/email, one could narrow behavior down to a name, or label you into a group of people for who knows what use. Not to mention IPs and "friend lists". Have you checked whitepages.com lately? If this much information can be gathered from legally public records, think of how much can be learned and assumed from illegal logging. It can't end well.
 
Well PC games waste your life hurt your eyeballs make you sedentary give you seizures spy on you cramp your brain with puzzles.
 
Tekara said:
If it were some stranger standing around in your house with a notepad jotting down everything you did, we'd all be in a uproar.
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tell me about it... the other day i was standing outside this really hot girls window recording everything she was doing.. all the various clothes she was trying on.. and MAN.. talk about no humor what so ever when she saw me outside her window...


but, being serious, it does make me shake my head with just how comfortable many are with the sheer volume of monitoring that goes on. and there is little to no OPT OUT to it. and then you see many software companies talk about how great it is.. for them.. to know all your doing with their software, like that makes it ALL worth while.
 
Since so many people have asked a similar question regarding why this matters and what someone can do with the data collected, here is a hopefully more informative answer set.

The short answer: the company can get better at selling you stuff you don't need and may not want, and can make more of what you do want and sell it to you better.

The long answer: with enough data points, anyone can be de-anonymized, and tracked. Your data can be sold to 3rd parties for profit, and companies get better at breaking down your mental barriers against buying stuff you don't need and don't want. For example, you see billboards of food along the highway for multiple reasons, one of which is to instill brand recognition and create desire for a certain product. Now imagine that your computer is the highway, and the ads that pop up are the billboards you see while whizzing by at 80 MPH. Seeing one ad for something may not get you to buy it, but seeing hundreds of ads for the same thing may eventually get you to purchase the item. By tracking what you play, and what ads you actually click on, a company can market their products to you more effectively. Continuing to use food as an example, a company knows you're playing Video Game A at 5pm every Tuesday. Thanks to data aggregation, the marketing company knows you have ordered Domino's Pizza from the app on your phone several Tuesdays at 5:15pm. To further entice you to order pizza again on this coming Tuesday, Google could show you an ad for pizza around 4pm. Consequently, the tracking company knows you like games such as Video Game A, so when you go to the app to order pizza, you are shown an ad for Video Game B, which market tested to show that people who liked Video Game A would be likely to purchase Video Game B. You could be shown an ad for Video Game A instead of Video Game B to reinforce your feeling of adequacy from purchasing Video Game A; in other words, you would feel that your purchase of Video Game A was a good purchase because you saw an ad that portrayed the game in a good light after your purchase; the feelings of pleasure and happiness would likely mean you would be more willing to buy another game from said the same game company.

Yes, every company does it. I would not be surprised in the slightest if [H] wasn't tracking us in one way or another for marketing or other purposes; even if it isn't Kyle and crew doing it directly, the ads running on their site or 3rd parties putting information on [H] may be doing it. Heck, I do it as a small business owner, with opt-in. We all want to make more money.

Even if we know we're being marketed to, it barely diminishes the effect of the marketing on our buying habits. There are literally billions of dollars spent every year on marketing for a reason: it makes companies more money.

Like Kyle said, the problem isn't that they're doing it, the problem is the analytics being hidden and misrepresented. Personally, I think all analytics like this should be opt-in, not opt-out, but I see nothing wrong with Company A doing it so long as Company B is doing it. A company would be crazy not to be data mining to maximize profits, as they will fall behind their competition. It's a similar logic to why doping is banned in most sports. Until it is banned and not used by all the players, every player has to do it to stay competitive.

On a small side note, go check out marketing 101 or more advanced marketing. It's fascinating how easily manipulated humans are, and sort of astonishing how much time and money has gone into studying the best ways to get us humans to buy things.
 
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Aioeyu said:
Since so many people have asked a similar question regarding why this matters and what someone can do with the data collected, here is a hopefully more informative answer set.

The short answer: the company can get better at selling you stuff you don't need and may not want, and can make more of what you do want and sell it to you better.

The long answer: with enough data points, anyone can be de-anonymized, and tracked. Your data can be sold to 3rd parties for profit, and companies get better at breaking down your mental barriers against buying stuff you don't need and don't want. For example, you see billboards of food along the highway for multiple reasons, one of which is to instill brand recognition and create desire for a certain product. Now imagine that your computer is the highway, and the ads that pop up are the billboards you see while whizzing by at 80 MPH. Seeing one ad for something may not get you to buy it, but seeing hundreds of ads for the same thing may eventually get you to purchase the item. By tracking what you play, and what ads you actually click on, a company can market their products to you more effectively.

Yes, every company does it. I would not be surprised in the slightest if [H] wasn't tracking us in one way or another for marketing or other purposes; even if it isn't Kyle and crew doing it directly, the ads running on their site or 3rd parties putting information on [H] may be doing it. Heck, I do it as a small business owner. We all want to make more money.

Even if we know we're being marketed to, it barely diminishes the effect of the marketing on our buying habits. There are literally billions of dollars spent every year on marketing for a reason: it makes companies more money.

Like Kyle said, the problem isn't that they're doing it, the problem is the analytics being hidden and misrepresented. Personally, I think all analytics like this should be opt-in, not opt-out, but I see nothing wrong with Company A doing it so long as Company B is doing it. A company would be crazy not to be data mining to maximize profits, as they will fall behind their competition. It's a similar logic to why doping is banned in most sports. Until it is banned and not used by all the players, every player has to do it to stay competitive.

On a small side note, go check out marketing 101 or more advanced marketing. It's fascinating how easily manipulated humans are, and sort of astonishing how much time and money has gone into studying the best ways to get us humans to buy things.
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So like MS putting all the telemetry and spyware in windows so they can use whatever data they collect, since the code is not open source, and make windows better?
I think in this case they went the opposite, but maybe the gaming industry can do better.
 
Shadowed said:
Sad to see Kerbal Space Program on the list. That is the one game I own up there.

But I do appreciate all the devs who acted to remove this crap.
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That bothered me a lot. It was removed, but the damage is done. It's about the companies now, not the games. Regardless of how "anonymizing" the data stream is and that it was done in a legal way (full disclosure in fine print and an using an encrypted data stream), it's still a moral issue that is going to annoy people. The fact that it was monitoring other elements outside of the game itself (global dns requests) would definitely place the devs in hot water if a bored lawyer wants to go after them. (Country-depending, of course.)

People get excited about game updates; new gameplay features, renewed interest, and more bang for the buck. Using an update as a vehicle to quietly append additional monetization features needs to be done with tact. Advertising the DLC or the alt platform apps would have been acceptable, but augmenting a game into a privacy-breaching data-miner in a patch is pretty dirty.
 
...and this is the one we know of.

How many other Red Shells are out there that we don't?

The list of hosts redshell uses are out there so you can block them in your firewall if you want, but it only takes an update for those hosts to change, and it is unrealistic to keep playing whack-a-mole and blocking hosts.

We need solid privacy legislation from confess to ban personal data collection once and for all. Unless there are actual laws preventing it, this shit will wind up snuck into everything.

Not all regulation is bad.
 
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Side note, my decision to use Linux as my primary OS, and keep Windows just for games is sounding better and better by the moment.

I don't even browse the web (much) from Windows. Just games. Because of this, there is a limit to how much data they can actually collect...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Side note, my decision to use Linux as my primary OS, and keep Windows just for games is sounding better and better by the moment.

I don't even browse the web (much) from Windows. Just games. Because of this, there is a limit to how much data they can actually collect...
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Not to mention your productivity is increased by not having all your entertainment and work on one OS. I love using Windows purely for gaming/entertainment.
 
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