Video games often ask us to share our data with the developers. Sometimes, games and other apps bury this question in a long privacy policy that you have to agree to in order to even load it up. And sometimes, that data gets sold or repurposed for mysterious ends. Kirk and I admitted how anxious we feel about that on this weekâs episode of Kotaku Splitscreen
Jason is recovering from oral surgery, so Kirk and I were left by ourselves to discuss the intricacies of Phoenix Wright and how its soundtrack compares to Danganronpa. Kirk is also playing Rage 2, Destiny 2, and a tabletop game about bluffing called Sheriff of Nottingham. In the news section (33:32), we discuss that beautiful Final Fantasy 7 teaser and our own memories of the game, and then we get into the privacy of our gameplay data (or lack thereof), inspired by this Vox article. We conclude with some off-topic discussion (58:47) about everything from Detective Pikachu to Patrick Rothfuss. Get the MP3 here, or read an excerpt below.
Kirk: [Vox reporter Kaitlyn] Tiffany uses Angry Birds as a starting point to talk about the idea of these third-party apps on your phoneâthey donât all have to be games, but they can be gamesâthe way that they have all these advertising intermediaries built into the software. You use the game, and then all of this other software is sharing your gameplay data with â it could be a whole bunch of different people. Sometimes itâs Facebook, or Twitter, or Google. Sometimes itâs just these other companies that sell advertising data to various other people. We donât even really know who. It gets into the whole idea of device identifiers, and tracking your device identifier across multiple apps. The idea that children are using these things, and itâs actually illegal for children to be tracked because of COPPA (the Childrenâs Online Privacy Protection Act), [but] that actually isnât protecting anyoneâŠ
It left me thinking about specifically our gameplay data and the way that in any game that we play, pretty much, we almost always agree to share our data. Itâs always like, âWe want to make the game better. Will you share your data?â And, generally speaking, Iâm guessing a lot of people just click âYes.â Because you think, âWhatever. What am I doing right now? Iâm playing this video game.â But as we spend more time playing a gameâand this is something that this Vox article lays out really wellâactually you can determine a lot about somebody. Especially if itâs a game like PokĂ©mon Go, a game that someone plays every single day. Especially that. Or even an MMO like Destiny. Bungie can tell a lot of stuff about me. They can tell who I play with, who my friends are.
Maddy: What times you play.
Kirk: How many hours, and even stuff about my play style, and what that might say about me.
Maddy: Do you just wander around aimlessly when youâre playing at certain hours of the day? How are you doing psychologically? That can all be determined from your play style, I guess. Spooky.
Kirk: Thereâs at least a theory for that. And that is increasingly making me feel like all of this data is something that weâre giving up so willingly and starting to wonder if weâre going to look back at this period of time as the period of time when we all just assumed that our data wasnât our own.
Maddy: I feel like thatâs already happening. Iâve experienced this with PokĂ©mon Go. When I reinstalled this game to play it with my girlfriend, thereâs all these new options in the game that actually werenât there when I first played it. It was a weird game even when I first played it; the entire game revolves around going to real-life locations, and even at the time I was like, âThis is really weird.â But the second time around, thereâs this âAdventure Syncâ thing you can do where it tracks your steps even when youâre not playing the game, and the way that you get PokĂ©mon to do anything in the game is that you have to walk around. All of it is tied to a pedometer; thatâs how everything in the game is unlocked. So if you donât connect this pedometer to be on all the time, youâd have to open up the app every time you went for a walk. Also, itâs pointless to do that, because then youâre just opening the game all the time anyway, so it always already knows where youâre going and what your steps are. So, in order to play this game and have it function the way itâs supposed to function, you have to turn on these location services and give the game permission to track your steps everywhere you go.
I donât go to that many locations. I work from home. I go to a track thatâs near my house, and I run around the track. Thatâs how most of my PokĂ©mon are leveling up. But, at the same time, I was super freaked out at the idea that Iâd have to turn this on and that Iâd have to get back into this game by allowing it to have access to that data, even though â this is the excuse that everybody says, that I just said â my data isnât even very interesting. I donât do anything. I donât care if they know that I go to CVS multiple times a week and swipe on the PokĂ©stop thatâs right outside of it. Thatâs fine if PokĂ©mon Go knows that I do that. But âŠ
Kirk: But⊠is it?
Maddy: Itâs also super fucking weird! I donât know if I want people to know how often I go to CVS. And who is finding out? What is that data being used for? I donât know the answer to that, and that makes me feel nervous, but in an unspecified and slightly irrational way that I canât justify. I canât even explain this neuroses. Itâs just like, you read Cambridge Analytica stories, you hear about the idea of your data not being your own anymore, and youâre like, that fucking sucks, but I also want to participate in playing this game and hanging out with my friends. I want to log into Facebook and find out whatâs going on with people and see pictures of their babies. But I am also having to deal with this low-level buzz of anxiety about the fact that anything that I do in these spaces is just up for grabs to the highest bidder. It blows.
Kirk: Itâs so related to the fact that itâs so complicated and deliberately impossible to understand. I totally know that feeling youâre describing. I feel the same way. The feeling of a sort of helpless, âWhatever.â I would talk with Emily about having the Amazon Alexa installed, which we used to have. We would joke about it on the podcast; I would say âAlexander,â because I couldnât say it. However, youâll notice Iâm saying it now, and thatâs because we took them all out of our house quite a while ago. As a test, we were like, âWhat if we unplug them all for a week and saw, in a week, is our life any worse?â Iâd read enough stories about all the things itâs recording, and the data that itâs collecting, and got rid of it.
With Apple, still, I have Siri turned on. Apple has been marketing the fact that your data is your own, despiteâas this Vox article actually points outâprofiting quite a bit off of the in-app purchase percentage that they take from these apps that use your data in this way. It is interesting to me to see Apple going at people directly and saying, âHey, everybody else steals your data, but we donât. Your data is yours, and we keep it pretty safe.â That, I feel like, is another sign that this is changing. At least theyâre willing to tell us that they understand that it matters enough to tell us that theyâre doing the right thing. Whether they are or not is another question.
For much more, listen to the entire episode. As always, you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts and Google Play to get every episode as it happens. Leave us a review if you like what you hear, and reach us at [email protected] with any and all questions, requests, and suggestions.
