EA's Origin may be glorified spyware, causes mass upset | Hacker News Reader

EA's Origin may be glorified spyware, causes mass upset

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It's also against german law. The software pictures, cell phone backups etc. and more and reportedly uploads the information to EA.

Luckily EA didn't arrive on Linux yet :)

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This sounds like the kind of thing that some MBA came up with;

Suit: "And in the Terms of Service, add some note so that we can use their personal info for marketing."

Cubicle-ee: "That's a little sleezy and sounds like it may backfire.."

Suit: "Nonsense, nobody reads the ToS and everybody is data mining people's personal info these days, they can't get mad at us without getting mad at everyone else too. Look at Google."

Why don't you throw lawyers under the bus while you are at it. After all, we know that everybody but coders are looking to screw the customer.

Because in most companies, it is the "coders" who are in charge, right?

flame/troll bait aside... This was most definitely intentional. EA has demonstrated a lack of giving a shit about customers since Spore and even before that. Spore was a catalyst. They prey on ignorance of users. The truth is by now someone is reading the TOS, and posting about it. The problem is that not everyone reads those posts.

And kids? They don't care about their "privacy" its "gimme mah game!!@?!@!@!@!#%$!" if you disagree with that statement deal with a hormone filled teenager.

Of course those kids who don't get the game will naturally look for hacked alternatives. And this is where EA's lack of understanding of the real world will bite them in the ass.

I have an MBA, I rarely wear a suit, and I have not sold out customers. Also, the majority of EA's management team (including CEO) does not have MBA's. So, at least in this specific example, the dreaded "MBA" label does not seem to be the culprit.

No no, I think you misunderstand my point.

It's the suits job, nay legal obligation in the case of a publicly held company, to maximize profits. More and more frequently we're seeing profits take precedence over privacy and customers, and I don't think that would have been possible as a bottom-up change coming from coders. No, this change came from the top, and coming from the top it spread to the tops of other companies like wildfire.

Also, I have no hesitations about throwing lawyers under the bus as well. They're the front line in the battle that these companies are waging against, what are often times paying customers, never mind that they're paying customers too and that they're ruining the future for our and their own children. What, you think it's just a matter of perspective and a lawyer sees things differently than I do? Show me one lawyer who has no qualms about arguing that a corporation is a person, and I'll show you a person who's sold their soul.

It's the suits job, nay legal obligation in the case of a publicly held company, to maximize profits.

No, it's the suit's job to run the company in the interest of the shareholders. That is not the same thing as 'maximize profits at all costs' (such as, at the cost of future litigation that will exceed the instant profit). This idea that if an opportunity for profit exists, the management is legally obliged to seize it is widespread, but without foundation. Otherwise shareholders would sue large firms for not entering hot new markets where the firms' resources would provide a short-term advantage.

Show me one lawyer who has no qualms about arguing that a corporation is a person, and I'll show you a person who's sold their soul.

Yeah, whatever. without the doctrine of corporate personhood, which lawyers are well aware is a different thing from natural personhood, you wouldn't be able to sue a corporation for malfeasance in the first place, but would have to try suing the officers of the corporation individually while they gave your legal claim the runaround.

I don't think it's so much that people believe corporations have a legal obligation to seize all opportunities for profit, I think it's that many corporations have been behaving in ways that the majority of the population believes is, or should be illegal. The people in charge of these companies are fully aware of the public perception of what they do, but they continue because they know they can get away with it with a few financial donations to some political campaigns here and there.

I don't think the vast majority of corporations do what you suggest. On the whole, IMO most corporations (private and public) contribute to the economy and society without being scoundrels.

Where does the personhood of a lump sum of money[1] come into play here?

[1]: http://dockets.justia.com/docket/connecticut/ctdce/3:2011cv0...

It doesn't, for two reasons. One, it has no particular connection to corporate personhood. Two, a case like that is called a proceeding in rem, which is literally 'against a thing.' It used to be called an 'impersonal' action, but my law dictionary says that term's deprecated.

Proceedings in rem are usually for the purpose of determining whether there's sufficient evidence to decide that a piece of property is a component in or the proceeds of crime, even if nobody has been caught. An example would be a drug bust where the criminals flee but leave behind a brick of cocaine and a suitcase full of cash. The government can't just seize the money and spend it; it has to come up with some objectively reasonable argument for why the valuables would be forfeit.

They do publish details of upcoming hearings in advance, so if you see that the government is trying to keep your stuff and you have a really good explanation for why you should get it back (eg it was stolen but you didn't call it in because you were in a coma following the robbery), then you can turn up at the hearing and get custody back.

It sounds more like legal:

Suit: "We're collecting this data? Why?"

Cubicle-dweller: "Dunno, seemed useful."

Suit: "Well, we better put something in the ToS about it so our customers know that we're storing it."

If it wasn't for the specific wording in the ToS allowing them to sell your info to marketers, I would be happy giving them that benefit of the doubt.

I couldn't find it in the current Terms of Service, so I expect that they saw the typical /r/gaming histrionics, checked and saw that they hadn't actually sold the info, figured out how much reddit histrionics cost in sales versus the almost-completely-absent demand for information about super-entitled whiny PC gamers, and decided it wouldn't hurt to remove it from the agreement and their business plans.

There is actually a case where Sears paid consumers for permission to spy on them and the FTC did not agree it was lawful: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/06/sears.shtm

EA is run by idiots if they think they can get away with this.

I know this is off topic, but it really burns me up to see the once mighty Origin Systems relegated to this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_Systems

I second this sentiment. Crusader no regret was one of my favorite games growing up. I don't believe I ever finished it, it was a difficult game, then again back then many things were hahahaha.

They got bought out nineteen years ago; it's not the "once mighty Origin Systems," it's a trademark that EA owns becoming attached to a product.

Brand Necrophilia.

This was posted back in August, hasn't EA changed the EULA since then? http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/action/battlefield-3/news/6331203/...

They only removed parts of it, specifically the parts allowing them to use the information for marketing.

Also the Germans are going nuts about it because they claim the Origin EULA is a violation of privacy laws:

http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/3477/article/origin-s-inv...

I was under the impression that Steam's anti-cheat bot actually did something similar to this too, scanning running programs to search for aimbots and the like. This might go further though, I have no idea if it scans non-steam folders.

I thought most EULAs were ruled invalid in Germany, as you pay for the product before you accept the EULA.

While this is technically true, the Origin EULA would be invalid in large parts even if it were accepted before paying. There's a detailed article (in german) here: http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/battlefield-3/artikel/analyse_...

There's a provision in german law that EULAs may not contain clauses deemed "surprising" or "unexpected". There are multiple paragraphs in the Origin EULA that violate this principle (such as reserving the right to scan all data on your computer).

There's another rule that customers may not be placed at a significant disadvantage if you're dealing with private customers. This rule is violated for example when EA reserves the right to terminate support for the game (rendering it effectively unusable) at any time at their sole discretion.

There's other minor points such as attempting to move eventual lawsuits out of country or reserving the right to unilaterally change the EULA at any time but that's more or less the icing on the cake.

The obvious consensus is that the EULA is invalid in pretty much any given point. Which means that the game is defective and may be returned to the store at any point after buying - a tempting idea actually :)

In other news: EA seems to back off a little http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Electronic-Arts-reagi... (german as well)

I'm not surprised. But why not use this to your advantage as a campaign? On a given day, everyone buys the game, then goes back and asks for a refund. Get everyone knowledgeable about the law, given them leaflets explaining the law to quote to the store clerks, forms to fill in with details if the clerks don't give the refund. Do this a few times.

Nobody cares about what gets scanned on the HDD. Antivirus, indexing apps etc all do that. Its the attempt to legally extract the info and (ab)use it that angers everyone.

>They only removed parts of it, specifically the parts allowing them to use the information for marketing.

They removed it from the Origin Terms of Service, which is nice, but left it in the privacy policy, so the overall change is... nothing.

This is why I install my games on a separate bootable harddisk, which I only boot when I want to play a game.

I do that as well.

Because games are the only reason I'd want to run Windows.

My favorite video game is "emacs". If you align all the characters correctly, you can make the computer do some pretty incredible things.

The RMS level is a bitch though.

Edit: I'm not joking about Emacs - sitting down to write some code/create something is what I do for fun.

I fed a game of Dwarf Fortress into Perl and my computer became self aware

And about fifteen minutes later when the catsplosion hit, really, really slow, right? :)

I've been doing this also for a couple of years now. It is amazing what most games do to a PC. Try watching your processes, services, network connections and the traffic going over them when you boot up a PC with a recent game installed on it. That's before you even run it to play anything.

Reboot to play a game is way too much of a hassle (IMO). What I'd want is a hypervisor that could handle graphics acceleration for one virtual machine at a time. When I wanted to play I just switched virtual machine and moved the ability to accelerate graphics from my workstation virtual machine to the gaming virtual machine (similar to the way some notebooks that have an integrated and a more powerful external graphics card can switch between them during runtime).

That would be a dream come true for me (if it worked well).

Isn't the other harddisk still visible and searchable?

If a piece of software is looking for other mountable partitions, mounting them, and reading data off of them, I would think that would be looked at as incredibly suspicious.

I did this too but had the other disks mounted (sometimes my girlfriend wants to stream media off the PC to her PS3 while I'm playing games). I have noticed that Origin will spin up inactive disks when launching Battlefield 3 (even causing the game to crash when joining a multiplayer server when the disk spinup time is > their timeout). It's ridiculous.

I admit I haven't read all the comments here so I apologize if someone else has made the following comment. This story is nonsense.

Install Process Explorer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653), launch Process Explorer, install Origin, launch Origin, log in with your username/password. Let Process Explorer run for an hour or so and filter out any results where the Origin directory is being read.

What are you going to find? Nothing.

Most of this outrage is based on a photoshopped screenshot in a BF3 forum, the rest is speculation, not based on fact.

Try the Process Manger experiment for yourself.

They may not actually be collecting data right now, but the ToS explicitly grants them the ability to do so at some point in the future.

People are freaking out on this like it's already happening. I point out how you can monitor the program and now I'm getting a negative feedback? Fuck this place.

The negative feedback is because you called the story nonsense. The story is about the TOS.

This is a low-quality submission. It's a two month old, three paragraph blog entry expressing a vague sentiment, with links to low-quality sources.

Can this even be legal? I see this is getting more and more common. Something has to be done about it now before every program you install starts calling home with info about your personal files.

Spotify does the same thing. Read the user agreement, in there somewhere theres a line about giving them full right to analyze and track your personal music collection that you have stored locally on your computer. Yes, that means your local mp3-files completely unrelated to the spotify service.

There are all kinds of ways this could potentially be invalidated in law, depending on your jurisdiction: privacy laws, computer misuse laws, unfair contract terms protections/limitations on what would be considered reasonable in a contract of adhesion, and indeed the fundamental question of what legal status any given EULA has and whether it is enforceable at all.

Unfortunately, governments seem unwilling to legislate to provide any clarity on EULAs despite their vast scope. Until they do, what we have is a mixed bag of case law, which has little consistency between jurisdictions or even sometimes within the same jurisdiction, and which in any case covers only a tiny number of very specific cases rather than giving much guidance on the broader principles.

I suspect that means if this is going to be struck down, it's going to be in places that have worthwhile privacy laws, which sadly are few and far between in the world today since technology seems to be running at least a decade ahead of the law's ability to deal with its implications, particularly with regard to form contracts and privacy where the increasing dependence on conducting business via automated on-line systems has profound implications.

EAOrigin will not last long. They gained UNLIMITED access to your system without consents, even when they should be scanning theirs own produce instead.

EA must leave PC Marketing at once and stick with Consoles.

By breaching every countries privacy law under false Amerikan Democratic.

Can we say Shitocratic?.

I hope the bad Amazon reviews based on Origin, which is just a poor Steam clone, don't deter people from buying Battlefield 3 - it is easily the best PC FPS game there has been for a long time. With a half decent graphics card it's no exaggeration to say the graphics are jaw dropping, and the game play matches it.

Unfortunately if you lose your internet connection mid game, Origin closes the game immediately. You lose all XP/progress you have made in the game since you launched it.

Steam had its share of problems when it launched and it looks like Origin is exactly the same, except the tool isn't there to make our gaming lives better but to stop piracy without giving a crap about the gaming experience.

I'm guessing this is what EA is hoping for. Have a few killer games to pull people in, and hopefully they overlook and forget about problems and eventually become happy customers.

I sure hope it does deter them. To show other publishers that making a neat game does not give them the right to spy on their customers.

    By using Valve's online sites and products, users agree
    that Valve may collect aggregate information, individual
    information, and personally identifiable information, as 
    defined below. Valve may share aggregate information and 
    individual information with other parties. Valve shall not
    share personally identifiable information with other 
    parties, except as described in the policy below.

It doesn't seem like it's much different than Steam. Check out the System Information option from the Help drop-down menu, I don't think it gathers that information by guessing. Steam was also forced onto users with the release of a much-anticipated product -- in Valve's case it was Half Life 2.

I have seen Steam pop up a dialog that says what they collected and asks if you would like to submit it or not. It does not seem like they submit the information without your explicit consent.

> But there’s a significant difference. Valve’s policy is self-restricted to anything on your PC directly relating to its own products. EA’s is so broad that it gives the publisher permission to scan your entire hard drive, and report back absolutely anything you may have installed, and indeed when you may use it, and then pass that information on the third parties.

So currently Valve uses that clause mainly to scan for cheats and hacks; EA goes way beyond.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/24/eas-origin-eula-p...

EA also updated Origin's EULA after that article was posted:

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/08/26/ea-revises-origin-eula-dat...

But not the Privacy Policy.

All they changed is the tone of the language, and nothing else.

Exactly. Bad behavior should be punished. If companies could just release any junk they wanted and paper it over with a hit game, the online rights world would be a worse place even than it is now.

Agreed on BF3 being an awesome game on the PC. I've been catching up with my old college buddies to play it and we haven't had this much fun since Counter-strike Source was released.

Those of us that were around in the early days of Steam remember how much it sucked originally. It wasn't uncommon to hear it referred to as "Steaming pile of shit". And it definitely collects data on your machine as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#Steam_Communit...

Are you an EA employee who created an account just to make this comment?

His/her comment seems pretty critical of EA and Origin. The Battlefield 3 comments I'd agree with.

Infact I'd agree with pretty much the entire statement and I've been around here for along time.

I'm not sure why you think liking a video game and begin critical of the company who produces it would mean the poster is an employee of the company.

The parent post has been edited since I made my comment.

It has deterred me from buying BF3 but the BF3 beta also deterred me from buying BF3. BF3 was full of bugs that were also in BC2, based on previous performance these bugs will not get fixed for a long time.

One of the serious things was that I had to change my password to something less secure, huge red flag there, only slightly less concerning than a company sending you your old password plain text when you want to reset it.

My trust of EA is nearing my trust of Sony. I've been boycotting Sony as a company since their whole rootkit debacle and every time I consider rescinding that boycott they do something that totally justifies it. I'm not boycotting EA yet but I'm being cautious, I'm not going to put my neck on the line and adopt their early stuff until I'm reasonably assured it's not going to do something evil through negligence or intention.

best quote ever = "Reddit, known for its anger over everything..."

Also doesn't help in this case that reddit loves steam and hates ea and origin.

And the article is 2 months old, what's up with that? Is this the most sensational article that can be found when searching for 'origin spyware'?

http://s1.directupload.net/file/d/2691/fglehhsj_jpg.htm http://i44.tinypic.com/2lc8q37.jpg Many upset people discuss their experiences and view in Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-3-Pc/product-reviews/B002I...

For all their bullshit, EA has a point about Steam. I hope they get them to change their mind about in-app purchases.

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