Crap EULA

[The Met4l God]

Why would anyone play this game when your EULA indicates that you're collecting my Steam ID, IP Address, and Voice/Chat data that is then processed by third parties?

[Caw Caw Caw]

thanks for telling me about that

[Tri-Enclave President CEO]

Question, how normal is this? Because this does seem like something most online games sadly do.

[Mr.Crane]

Most, if not all, online games have this in a terms of service. Its so they can connect you to other lobbies I believe. Don't play or get a refund if you dislike the idea. However I can say with certainty that your web browser steals more than this game ever will.

[Tr3m0r]

Originally posted by Mr.Crane:

Most, if not all, online games have this in a terms of service. Its so they can connect you to other lobbies I believe. Don't play or get a refund if you dislike the idea. However I can say with certainty that your web browser steals more than this game ever will.

You are just speaking words minimizing the whole thing but don't have any actual knowledge of how this stuff works. First, to no derail the thread, I actually had questions about how this game uses our info for potential ai purposes and if a developer responds then that's excellent.

Your post is not all inaccurate in that many EULAS are quite general and scary if you read through them but those times are changing and studios can be fixed tremendously for even poor wording of terms that are not easy to read and understand. There also needs to be clear opt in and opt out sections for anything that has to do with privacy data that is not game specific.

Studios and all of tech has done horrible things with peoples privacy data and essentially when you said that there is nothing the game is doing that isn't being done by third parties is inaccurate. Studios can and do sell all of the information if they want to third parties which can include what your name, gender, ip address is, any content associated with that ip address, credit card information and buying habits. It will also link you to anything you buy on steam, the social platforms you engage with and will link together say a Facebook, discord, X account and steam which just makes your information more valuable. It all basically automatically creates a behavioral and psychological profile for you that targets third parties to your entire data package. There is no such thing as "this game only does X." It's all tied together. Some eulas will say they will sell or give your data over to governments willing to buy it. Truly.

As for my concerns, games like this can be just pure fun but other motives (I'm not accusing anyone here) from other studios sometimes want to just play the ai data mine game. So this is a game where my concern is that people will be unknowingly interacting with bots and ai algorithms that will be modified and trained on all the voice analytics, choices and inferential learning this game could cultivate. Deception probabilities could be analyzed with data scientists just from the vocal characteristics combined with the outcome data of successful and failed deception attempts.

Hardly anyone talks about this stuff which is why I do it because there is a strong need for ethics and standards with this type of potential. There's an assumption all the fancy ai military defense force contracts would be doing all this stuff and I'm sure there are. Or are they just buying the results from the data scientist and CEO from an investment firm who did the research from the thousands of hours of online games? Gaming can be tremendously weaponized due to the complexity of the dynamics, mechanics and on the fly neural thoughts and decisions which is why our brains are being compared to neural networks and conceptually as quantum computers.

This isn't science fiction or a curious imagination as I'm evaluating my own options getting into this field as a disenchanted psychologist who just happens to be great at pattern recognition and interested in the intersection of ethics and ai and responsible transparent proconsumer protections. Hopefully valve realizes the job they forget to list on their employment page is what I wrote 😉

[major masingil]

After i read the EULA, I decided not to play. After reading @Tr3m0r's reply above I'm glad I wasn't just being a dill. I probably still am one, but at least I'm not alone. Unfortunately, now I can include a desire to not train AI on how to deceive us in my dill-ness