After the outrage over the last few days regarding EA's Origin service, its EULA--which, at one point, made it sound like EA was collecting a great deal of user information and reserving the right to willingly distribute it to unnamed partner third parties--and the distinct lack of an opt-out feature for any of its apparent data mining activities, EA has responded by apparently updating its EULA to rephrase any and all references to data collection in such a way as to not make it sound quite as insidious as before.
The new EULA, posted on August 24th (and brought to my attention by GB user Commisar), addresses data collection with the following language:
EA knows that you care how information about you is collected, used and shared, and we appreciate your trust that we will do so carefully and sensibly. Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and EA would never sell your personally identifiable information to anyone, nor would it ever use spyware or install spyware on users’ machines. We and agents acting 37683v1 on our behalf do not share information that personally identifies you without your consent, except in rare instances where disclosure is required by law or to enforce EA’s legal rights.
In addition to information that you give EA directly, EA collects nonpersonally identifiable (or anonymous) information for purposes of improving our products and services, providing services to you, facilitating the provision of software updates, dynamically served content and product support as well as communicating with you. The non-personally identifiable information that EA collects includes technical and related information that identifies your computer (including the Internet Protocol Address) and operating system, as well as information about your Application usage (including but not limited to successful installation and/or removal), software, software usage and peripheral hardware.
As noted above, this information is gathered periodically for purposes such as improving our products and services, troubleshooting bugs, and otherwise enhancing your user experience. This and all other data provided to EA and/or collected by EA in connection with your installation and use of this Application is collected, used, stored and transmitted in accordance with EA’s Privacy Policy located at www.ea.com. To the extent that anything in this section conflicts or is inconsistent with the terms of EA’s Privacy Policy, the terms of the Privacy Policy shall control.
The original EULA can still be found here, if you want to check for comparison's sake. While the fact that you still can't opt out of any data collection whatsoever is still a bit troubling, the changes here are definitely a huge improvement over the murky and downright hostile language that was previously posted. So what say you, Giant Bomb community? Are you satiated by the changes EA has made?
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