cryware: Not entirely our fault I think, because somehow there are always people actively against this things but is not just a matter of exercise the rejection not buying, or informing our neighbours consumers... that is not enough.
This requires and demands more areas and their true engagement: laws, IT, education, social lobbying.
Because the simplistic solution of auto excluding us into the offline installers is mere st.p.d
Think all those hopes and IT dreams we gamers share, that are not fullfilled yet (cross play, hardware independent, immersion, to name a few) We are not going to give up on them and go back to play pong just to avoid any telemetry! We need to keep it Smartly! and we are fooling us with the "simple" term :)
Because laws to protect our privacy and such so far have been doing such an excellent job. I don't believe more of what we've been doing is going to change anything. The average person just doesn't care about this, even though they're aware.
kohlrak: This is honestly our fault, though. We could've said no, and if enough people rejected it it would've went another way, but, no, no one rejected.
pht: That's false and nobody really lives or thinks that way.
Stop and consider what happens when you apply that in the rest of life.
"it's their fault because they *didn't fight back*"
----
Sure, we should have seen this coming and pointed it out at the start, but when people complained back in the days of half life 2, we were treated as retrograde luddites.
Now we are in the situation where there is no viable option for most of the bigger games. Making money and "bugfixing" by telemetry has become normal. It shouldn't be.
Ironically, this is one of the contributing factors to the horrid patches for windows. MS effectively got rid of their pre-release bugtesting/qc department on windows patches and instead are trying to rely on telemetry, so now we get bsods, data being erased, random failures, etc, at a level we didn't before.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember industry could operate without constant snitching.
Like i said, to the other guy: we don't care. It's been shown that this info has been also used outside of the companies that are grabbing it, and no one cares. People still put alexas in their house and such. Your average person doesn't see it as a threat (regardless of whether it is or not). There's no reason we couldn't learn some coding and go our own way. It's not like there aren't free (in all meanings) OSes out there, and it's not like we can't make our own games. Obviously, those who do care, complain, but are still subject to it all have all decided that their AAA games, official GOG (or Google, or Microsoft, or whatever company) support is more important than their privacy. This is the basis of capitalism: we choose what we buy (except in alot of special cases that i think we possibly could use some solutions in, like in health care, where we have to sign the dotted line and get the service rendered prior to hearing the price).
Canuck_Cat: I know it's uncomfortable that they're tracking this much activity, especially without consent, but is it really that bad? Or are people being paranoid about what this could become? I don't see anything malicious they could do with this data given the metrics they're tracking here, but I could be wrong.
Right off the bat, this could cause performance issues without even using the data. I'm sure if i went over this with a fine toothed comb, i could come up with some things.
Canuck_Cat: I know it's uncomfortable that they're tracking this much activity, especially without consent, but is it really that bad? Or are people being paranoid about what this could become? I don't see anything malicious they could do with this data given the metrics they're tracking here, but I could be wrong.
pht: Yes, it's that bad. "being paranoid" is a red herring - a distraction, that avoids the real discussion.
Even if they were being 100% transparent about what all the data that's collected, and what they do with it (even right down to the individual level), well, we see how people either don't or can't really get their arms around it to understand it. Who downloads the information collected on them from the platforms that give that option? How many have downloaded their info from a certain VERY popular gaming chat client? How many of us could really understand it if we did?
The fact that it is not necessary (it wasn't before. I lived it - mass telemetry as it exists now wasn't a thing before steam in the gaming world) just exacerbates it.
"Consent" is something that is only given lip service. There can be no consent to things you don't even know or can't even understand. You can't know your cost for the information you're giving up. Worse - yes, it gets worse - all this information (which, again, the games industry didn't use to need and IMO don't now) is what I call "acidic data" - any container you put it in, it eats at, because it is oh-so-tempting to the collectors and bad actors on the outside.
But because this stuff is intentionally hidden and never seen, and people who try to look into it are laughed off as luddites and paranoids ... it just continues.
until everything is lost in a hack or to a bad actor in the company. Than there's a tiny breather and the temptation drives developers right back into the same feeding trough.
I mean, you could just not install it. Is it that hard? Now, if you wanted to say that there's a problem with telemetry being forced upon people without knowledge prior to purchase, there you could have an argument (and even some existing laws to potentially combat it), but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the galaxy client.
I mean, i didn't install galaxy, either... I mean, hell, what do people think is going on in Galaxy?
Now, wait until someone says something everyone's Lord and Savior, Discord. Then up in arms about how there's no alternative, how we have to give them our data, etc etc etc. I can't imagine these people back in 2005.
