Home Gaming Battlefield 3 on PC insists on using Origins and stealing your data

Battlefield 3 on PC insists on using Origins and stealing your data

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Origin

Are you one of the millions planning on buying Battlefield 3 on PC? Well if yesterday’s story about the 24 player limit didn’t make you think twice about it then this surely will.

It has been confirmed that if you want to play Battlefield 3 on PC you will also have to install EA’s Steam clone, Origins, on your PC for DRM purposes and to try tempt you into only using that and to ditch Steam.

That’s all good and well and to be expected but what has taken the Internet by surprise this morning is that someone has actually read the Terms and Conditions for Origins, yeah I’m blown away as well.

But even more surprising than that is what they found, take careful note of this next passage

You agree that EA may collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information that identifies your computer (including the Internet Protocol Address), operating system, Application usage (including but not limited to successful installation and/or removal), software, software usage and peripheral hardware, that may be gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, dynamically served content, product support and other services to you, including online services. EA may also use this information combined with personal information for marketing purposes and to improve our products and services. We may also share that data with our third party service providers in a form that does not personally identify you. IF YOU DO NOT WANT EA TO COLLECT, USE, STORE, TRANSMIT OR DISPLAY THE DATA DESCRIBED IN THIS SECTION, PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL OR USE THE APPLICATION.

I’ve taken the liberty of bolding the 2 parts that make my skin crawl just a little bit, basically if you install Origins you are giving EA permission to check what software you have on your machine and how often you use it. And then for them to use that data for marketing purposes.

So while waiting for Battlefield 3 to load you may be hit with targeted ads trying to get you to change from using Firefox and rather use Google Chrome, or to maybe tell you that playing an online sex game 3 times a day isn’t overly healthy (it is you know)

Obviously people are concerned about their privacy being invaded here and in reality we should be forcing EA to change these terms and conditions but unfortunately we’ve become used to not really having any privacy and as such I don’t expect too much of an Internet kickback.

But let us know if this means you’ll be getting BF3 on console instead or maybe even just abandoning it forever and taking MW3 out for a spin instead.

Source: Gameinformer

[Thanks to Michail for the tip]

Last Updated: August 25, 2011

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