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?
Meh.
We'll just wait and see, won't we?
i wouldn't use origin anyway. no matter how nice they are about it.
So what does the Privacy Policy say Patrick?
This just goes to show how few people actually bother to read the EULAs they agree to. The reason they aren't more careful about wording is they figure no one is actually going to read it. They got caught this time, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were hundreds of other games/services that had similar or worse wording in their EULA that haven't ever been exposed.
Seems more clear, but I already uninstalled Origin and I don't have a reason to put that software on my machine ever again.
Oh, EA.
Origin needs to die...Long live Steam.
@ArcadiaExeter said:
May I ask why?
They removed every reference to "own your [henceforth, "the client"] soul", right? Just kidding. Couldn't care less about Origin.
Is there paragraph that says they can change the EULA whenever they want? That's what I'd look for. Companies change them all the time. The thing is, they can change it after they already have your data. It's not like you can delete the data from their systems by uninstalling Origin at that point.
I have Origin beta thing installed. So far there haven't been any robots or anything coming for me yet.
I'm updating it right now though, so so things could get messy.
Edit: Hey awesome! I own Burnout Paradise. Uh-oh, being occupied by the update made me forget about my pizza in the oven. Now the cheese a little more done than I would like it.
FUCK YOU ORIGIN
@Elusionar said:
This, and they can make it sound less sinister, but they can't hide their intent. It's already clearly been proven by this action alone without the need of help from any other bad PR. We got a peek at their cards, and they've asked the dealer to deal a fresh hand. Doesn't change the fact there's still a douchebag holding the cards. (EA)
I will never be satisfied.
@nintendoeats said:
It says this: http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACY/US/en/PC/
Note that this policy was, effectively, in place already. The previous version of the EULA said that the PP takes precedence over the Origin EULA, and the new EULA's language is very similar, now, to the PP.
whatever, i'm just gonna disable that crazy service once i install origin anyway. not like i'm not gonna use origin if BF3 and SWTOR use it anyway