By now you’ve heard rumors and such about the EULA in Origin and the horrors that it allows. Well, GameSpot addresses these concerns and takes a closer look at the EULA. Is your privacy at risk? Does EA know what programs/games you have on your PC? I’m not going to comment on this, as I will keep my opinion to myself, be it good or bad. Read the article below to find out what GameSpot says about the Origin EULA.
Fears have also arisen that Origin serves as a clandestine new way for EA to violate users privacy. Posting to The Escapist’s message boards, forum user Dirty Hipsters called out Origin’s End User Licensing Agreement, claiming that not only does the verbiage allow EA to “monitor your PC and to make a profile of you,” but also detect “illegally downloaded material” and see what websites have been viewed. This information can also then be passed on to third parties, Dirty Hipsters said.
Consulting Origin’s EULA, the passage in question can be found in Sections 2 and 3, titled “Consent to Collection and Use of Data” and ” Application Communications and Conduct/Privacy Settings,” respectively. When EA refers to the “Application” in this context, EA notes that it is in reference to Origin and all related software, documentation, and updates.
Source: SimsVIP
Well, I never bothered with EA Download Manager and I’m not planning to install Origin anytime soon, either. After the whole SecuROM mess, I don’t trust EA anymore.
Advising people not to install this seems like a good move. Yet a lot seem to totally disregard these warnings, maybe I’m too picky when it comes to certain applications that connect to the Internet by themselves. Deja vu of an uncertain future…
For my opinion, I read the EULA and the privacy policy, and I don’t have a problem. What many articles on this, including the one you’ve linked to, fail to mention is that the privacy policy overrides the EULA where they conflict.
So the privacy policy states that they won’t send any personally identifiable data to third parties, and any information collected from your computer will be aggregated and not personally identifiable… so I really don’t have a problem with that.
Of course they are going to want to get statistics on what kind of controllers people are using, what graphics drivers they have installed, etc, but as long as they don’t look at mine and say “oh I see BlackGarden has an ATI card and hasn’t updated her drivers in 3 years the lazy cow” then I don’t have a problem. And the privacy policy states that they can’t do that. So, this is a non-issue for me.