Removing this from my wishlist due to spyware

[Valar Morghulis]

Regardless of them 'removing'the spyware, if they even did. They still chose to add it in the first place. This OBSESSION with data gathering for no other reason than spam and selling it to third parties, for more spam, is Totally unacceptable. Games are meant to have fun. If we cannot trust we a company, we cannot have fun.

So this developer is on my black / ignore list from now on.

[Ishan451]

Did you bring your own horse or do you want to rent one?

[mbradtke]

Thanks for sharing your precious opinion with us, i hope you were able to satisfy your obsession for sharing the very important and -hot discussed- spyware topic by making another thread about this.
best regards, a confused player, there is a ignore list for devs? ahh... prolly personal note

[hilburnashua]

Ok, bye, don't let the door hit you on the way out!

[Soul]

from simple google search....

"AppsFlyer said it works with more than 12,000 customers, including eBay, HBO, Tencent, NBC Universal, Minecraft, US Bank, Macy's and Nike. It also says it saw more than $150 million in annual recurring revenue in 2019, up 5x from its Series C in 2017.Jan 21, 2020"

so good luck reasearching the other 12,000 companies that use it.... without even telling you that they use it.... so you can stop using their services too...

may Shelyn brighten and vivify your day!

[THAC0]

Originally posted by Valar Morghulis:

Regardless of them 'removing'the spyware, if they even did. They still chose to add it in the first place. This OBSESSION with data gathering for no other reason than spam and selling it to third parties, for more spam, is Totally unacceptable. Games are meant to have fun. If we cannot trust we a company, we cannot have fun.

So this developer is on my black / ignore list from now on.

there never was spyware, So good jorb proving your prob one of these ppl that just over-react to the simplest BS news there is out there so good jorb
your prob one of these peeps that think BG3 is a good game as well

[Freak4Leeks]

Originally posted by Valar Morghulis:

This OBSESSION with data gathering for no other reason than spam and selling it to third parties, for more spam, is Totally unacceptable. Games are meant to have fun. If we cannot trust we a company, we cannot have fun.

Amen bruv.

[Lungbutter]

Originally posted by Valar Morghulis:

Regardless of them 'removing'the spyware, if they even did. They still chose to add it in the first place. This OBSESSION with data gathering for no other reason than spam and selling it to third parties, for more spam, is Totally unacceptable. Games are meant to have fun. If we cannot trust we a company, we cannot have fun.

So this developer is on my black / ignore list from now on.

Dude, we don't even know who you are. Play whatever you want. WTF

"Hey guys, did you hear? Steam user Valar Morghulis isn't gonna play Pathfinder WOTR! I can't believe it! This is huge!"

As far as I can tell, nobody here talks about you or keeps tabs on your personal lists. You can sit back and stick to porn games for all we care.

[Maligner]

It's a valid point. Too bad more people don't care about important things. I'm searching to find out if there truly is spyware or not. Because I try not to use products with it. And to the poster talking about "12000" companies doing it, I can tell you I probably don't use most of those services or corporations products because I have the intelligence to make choices. The ones listed, I do not use or buy from. I'm sure I do use products with hidden spyware and other nefarious dealings that are well hidden, but if companies knew there was serious backlash, then maybe it wouldn't be so widespread. So your lackadaisical attitude is pathetic.

[xunlaiAgent]

It wasn't much of a spyware... If you are that concerned about privacy, then you better also not use Tinder / Facebook / Instagram / tiktok / etc . Those are trillion times worse than adfly.

Problem is that people don't even understand what is true spyware and data mining and what is a simple flagging tool for measuring the efficiency of marketing campaigns.

[Erikkustrife]

Private profiles should not have access to the fourms :D if they want to be private then keep your opinions private.

[Ishan451]

Originally posted by Maligner:

It's a valid point. Too bad more people don't care about important things. I'm searching to find out if there truly is spyware or not.

There isn't and the issue wasn't Adfly but mostly the fact that they poorly explained what it did and more importantly expected you to agree to the TOS with no way to avoid Adfly integration, effectively holding the game hostage. The later was the issue for most people, myself included.

I wouldn't have cared about Adfly if i could have opted out.

Then later we learned all Adfly would have done was track the fact if you clicked on the DLC announcements on the main menu or not.

Originally posted by Maligner:

if companies knew there was serious backlash, then maybe it wouldn't be so widespread. So your lackadaisical attitude is pathetic.

Well... there was a serious backlash here and the Developer reacted to it quickly and promptly. Not only did they never try to fly it under the radar but also removed the thing, with a promise not to bring it ever back and to delete all data gathered in the interim, in less than 24 hours.

If anything the action of Owlcat were exemplary and exactly how we as customers would want them to react to a misstep/misscalculation on their end.


But even though Owlcat did everything right people still are freaking out and/or blame them for the EULA having a data sharing entry due to the fact that there is ingame Bugreporting feature that necessitates such a clause.

But the sky is falling and all that. How dare they be open and frank about it, react to remove it in less than 24 hours and apologize for their mistake...

This is really the thing that annoys me the most. Owlcat reacting how i wish all other companies reacted to this ♥♥♥♥ and listening to us customers, and people still paint them as the irredemable bad guy, while other companies simply don't bother to be transparent and tell you this ♥♥♥♥ and just sneak it onto your system. And can you blame them, seen this reaction? So disheartening to me.

Originally posted by Erikkustrife:

Private profiles should not have access to the fourms :D if they want to be private then keep your opinions private.

I don't give tours through my home to strangers, why should i supply your voyeurism fetish with access to my Steam profile? Not to mention all the people that think its a valid argument to go "You have X hours in game Y, thus your opinion is invalid".

There isn't a point in time where you need to know all the games associated with my account.

[lemurs2]

Op, I hope you did not use Steam to write this, as spyware.
And Google, Bing, Yahoo, pretty much everyone... spyware.
People have their spyware rants while they use all of the 10x worse spyware.
Makes me understand why democracy is doomed.

[Soul]

Originally posted by Maligner:

It's a valid point. Too bad more people don't care about important things. I'm searching to find out if there truly is spyware or not. Because I try not to use products with it. And to the poster talking about "12000" companies doing it, I can tell you I probably don't use most of those services or corporations products because I have the intelligence to make choices. The ones listed, I do not use or buy from. I'm sure I do use products with hidden spyware and other nefarious dealings that are well hidden, but if companies knew there was serious backlash, then maybe it wouldn't be so widespread. So your lackadaisical attitude is pathetic.

lol "lackadaisical"... im far from it really....

when the update first hit and I saw the announcment of them adding Appsflyer I didnt know what it was... never even heard of it before... so I exited the game when I saw the new EULA popup and went to research it... what it was... what it did... what other companies use it.... THATs why I got that number from google... cause I wanted to know if it was legit spyware or not instead of just letting the tide of voices tell me what to think instead of thinking for myself....

granted a lot of it was over my head as far as how it works specifically... I got the general gist of it I think though... and when I noticed that companies like Amazon uses it and is partnered with Google... well... I reasoned if my issue is with the appsflyer itself and if I believed it to be the reason to not play this game... then I should go through and figure out all the other companies that use it without telling me that they do and stop using their products as well... afterall it would be unfair of me to judge one company that uses it while still using something like Amazon that uses it... thats when I saw that large number of companies and was pretty much "FML" after seeing that number...

but regardless... after my research do I think it was "spyware"... kinda sorta not really... lol... I mean if it was i'd say it would be the "benign" type of "spyware" if anything... but thats just my personal opinion.... but by the time I reached that conclusion they reversed course and removed it so none of that matters now anyway...

so I wasnt being lazy about it at all... I did my own research...

[Ishan451]

Man, it is a wonder we still have aluminum foil at this point.

[Pinhead Larry]

Originally posted by talemore:

I suspect as much that steam is no longer an usa company since it protects the interests of chinese companies. As such they're protecting us from them. The berlin wall is nothing compared with today's intergate. In fact the last decade countries been investing on keeping people gated.

Reduce economy by reducing energy which is reducing travel. The travel of data is as much energy like a car or a food source since oil is used to create food.

For this reason data collection is stealing energy since nobody ask who is paying to steal people. These companies parasite on the distribution of wealth through a corruption on whom deserve to be given the distribution when the data collection itself is automatic.

Steam is privately owned, with Gabe Newell owning somewhere around >50% or so. I cannot find any outside investors that have any stake of ownership in Steam or Valve, so this is most likely an incorrect statement.