Maybe it's a EU/Polish privacy protection laws specialty.

I had one or two of the emailing options checked. From a technical point of view the update worked as intended.

But again, I strongly disagree that consent to getting emails from GOG on specified events is the same thing as everything that could be vaguely defined as "marketing purposes". This was pushed on me and every other user who wouldn't want that to be happening to them without being asked about it beforehand.

It's not really a change in privacy per se, they don't have any more rights than the ones that were already covered in their privacy policy. It's a change of wording tied to their relocation from Cyprus to Poland (with the added new functionality of disabling all e-mails at once). And If elcook needs to talk to the legal staff IMHO it's probably because any wording changes must be approved by them, even if it's just some extra clarification.

It seems that being outraged has long become a favorite sport on these forums.

Sometimes, when something is actually seriously broken, it may be warranted.

In this case, however, this generic rage makes no sense whatsoever. GOG knows pretty much nothing about you, compared to your bank, your phone company, etc. Even if they decided to sell all your info what exactly do they know? That you spent 600 hours playing HuniePop - Deluxe Edition? The email tied to your PayPal account? What country you log in from? Oh noes!

If you are worried about privacy, there are numerous other companies (which actually know a lot and might do damage) that you should be concerned about and spend your energy fighting. These wild accusations and conspiracy theories about GOG, along with angsty lamentations of them "losing their way and vision" are laughable in larger context.

GOG has problems. Sure. Mostly engineering problems that affect the forum and 3.5 people on it. (Probably 0.0000001% of their user base.) So far as I recall the forum bugs could actually affect other users were very few, such as the JS injection bug earlier this year. I'm not making excuses for their buggy web applications, but most of the hate they get for here is entirely misplaced.

How about "emails"?

That's a question to ask elcook and Gog legal team.

I am no lawyer I don't know what they can and cannot use, maybe in EU/Poland they cannot simply ask for consent to send "e-mails" but need to ask for the more open ended "marketing communication", that I don't know.

I kind of agree with this, it is not as if GOG does not want to market stuff to you, the vague language is a little worrying but it does not seem nasty.

It took me a while to align your original post with that statement. What you probably meant to say was that the checkbox couldn't imply sharing personal data with a 3rd party because GOG's Privacy Policy didn't allow for it in the first place, no matter what a checkbox on their site said. Which would be a very comforting thought.
You were making a good point that flew right by me because you didn't explicitly say it out loud. Sorry.

You're right. It didn't. That's why I worded it the way I did.

"This is the explanation they gave..."

Sorry if it still wasn't clear.

Personally, think gog could drop themselves in the shit with this.
Laws state that they have to get permission to sign you up for these kinds of things in some countries, yet there's been 2+ have had the option set for them regardless, even after changing it back.

Hell, we all know how broken this site can be at times. Yesterday I again had to change the setting for Country displayed on side of forums (something that should've been removed ages ago!).

So, it's only a matter of time until you suddenly get spammed with email because "Oh noes, the site broke & set everyone to wanting them"...

If I did not check the forums after receiving the e-mail notification, I would not be aware of expressing "consent" to anything, either.

I really dislike the direction GOG has been taking for quite some time now. It started precisely as an alternative, and often opposite, distribution platform to Steam.

I have frequently bought more expensive games on GOG precisely to support it, but if this is to become second Steam, I see no reason to.

Privacy should be another core tenant of GOG, but apparently we now live in a world where privacy of customers is not a legitimate business concern (hell, just read about the Equifax breach, and these guys were supposed to be super-security-conscious).

Vague legal terms merely invite abuse of trust. Companies change, or get bought out, and all that personal data sure is trending among big businesses. Fun fact - the "non-personally-identifiable-information" in reality... is. You can easily use hardware profile to track users across the intertubes, but the legal definition is about a decade, if not more, behind.

/rant

If this is outrage, then it's at a Ned Flanders level.

Seems to me that most folks are simply asking that the checkbox area clarify whether or not any customer info gets shared outside of gOg. That can be accomplished by adding the word "only". Nobody is asking for a major site overhaul for this one thing. At the least, they could add a direct link that takes the user to the Privacy Policy, since that's where the user can get the full details on what "processing of my personal data for marketing purposes by GOG" means.

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632109-Privacy-Policy

/outrage, I guess

This is why I...

1. Check that network connectivity isn't listed in the system requirements before I buy
2. Test the game on an airgapped machine
3. If that fails, demand a refund for failing to work on a system listed as supported.
4. If it succeeds, do my usual offline backup routine in case GOG ever goes under.

(Similar to how, whenever I buy from the "3 for $15" PC games bin at the local used games store, it's done with the understanding that the owner will let me bring the games back and trade them for something else if they turn out to have an un-advertised online activation requirement or they're missing a CD key.)

gog have turned out to be scum.