The world of gaming has come a long way in the last decade or so. Whereas gaming used to be a somewhat solitary activity, now it can be enjoyed with millions of other like-minded individuals around the globe by connecting to an online network of users. While this does enhance the gaming experience significantly, it’s not without its risks and pitfalls.
For example, most (if not all) gaming platforms will ask for certain information (such as name, location, email address and age, etc.) when signing up to their services. Many of them make this process a prerequisite for using their platform – and the harvesting of information doesn’t stop there. Read on to find out what kind of data these platforms collect, the reasons why they do so and why you should be concerned about the phenomenon.
Amassing an online profile
As well as inputting your personal information, you’ll also likely be asked to review and agree to a privacy policy or user agreement when you first sign up to a gaming platform. These documents are often purposely crafted to be long-winded, tedious to read and full of jargon which makes their intentions all but intelligible to the user.
These agreements are required by law to outline the type of information they intend on collecting and the purposes to which they plan to put it. This can go above and beyond the vital statistics mentioned above to include a history of your financial activity regarding in-game purchases, your choices within the gameplay itself and even the social media sites to which your account is linked.
What is done with the information?
In the most benign scenarios, this information is simply leveraged to give game developers a better understanding of how users interact with their product, so as to equip them with the knowledge to improve it in the future. However, there are darker possibilities at play here, since the industry remains a largely unregulated one in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, that means that the data removal services used for other data online can’t typically help with gaming.
For example, the types of data points mentioned above might seem harmless enough in isolation, but when cross-referenced against other information available about you online, they could be used to build up a more detailed psychological profile of your character. This could theoretically affect everything; from the kinds of targeted ads you see online to whether or not your loan application is approved to success in applying for a new job role.
The dangers of data breaches
Aside from the legitimate and lawful ends to which gaming information might be applied, there is also the chance that the platform could be targeted by hackers and cyber criminals. For example, 1,800 usernames and passwords of Minecraft players were leaked online in 2015, shortly after the game was acquired by Microsoft.
As well as affording cyber criminals the opportunity to infiltrate a player’s personal account and potentially undo the work they had put in across thousands of hours of gaming time, this also meant that the sensitive data could be sold on the dark web. Other malicious actors might purchase this data for the purposes of identity theft, fraud or blackmail, among other negative outcomes. Clearly, that’s a danger for anyone gaming online.
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