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Comment by otikik | Hacker News Reader

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otikik

Save a couple GB of hard drive storage in exchange of a big PR problem and sending your image down the drain.

Stroke of genius.

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You're not wrong, but basic account data + game ownership information is probably one or two KB at most, instead of GB.

1-2KB per player, so a couple GB across all accounts.

They probably are not going to delete all accounts, and thus not going to save "couple GB of hard drive storage"

Ah gotcha, that's fair.

It's about avoiding legal risk. User data is a legal liability to store.

They could easily pseudonymize the data by removing payment info, personal info, etc. but keeping the games because why wouldnt you let people keep their games as a game company

Lets say they did this. They remove all personal info, including the email address for signing into the account. So technically the games are still attached to the account, but there is no way for you to sign in to it and there is no way for you to prove that you are the owner of the account.

It isn't any different from the user's perspective than just deleting the data.

I mean there is, you send out randomized credentials "please use these for your next login". And if someone lost access to their e-mail address, the proof of ownership would be the same as it is today (aka sending receipts, keys, etc.).

But lets really be honest: These kind of companies dont give two sh*ts about security leaks and GDPR infringements, as is demonstrated almost every other week by news. Privacy or legal compliance is most certainly not the reason they are doing this.

Email isn't PII. They'd have no reason to delete it.

> Email isn't PII

What's your email address?

Only if you hoard more data than you need to.

But what if an AI needs that training data in the future, huh?? :)

Do you have a source? It sounds odd to me that storing data for say 2*N users would be a significantly bigger problem than for N.

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