That’s the thing, though. I respect the analogy, but the equivalent here would be if the game was also checking your drive for other games, for financial apps, scanning your browser’s cookies to see which sites you visit, etc.

If, while playing a singleplayer game, they’re recording what actions you take within that singleplayer game, it’s understandable some people wouldn’t even want that - but I also don’t see that as nearly so invasive as other data travesties. Worse, highlighting it here feels like a “cry wolf” situation where you’d desensitize people to the most harmful privacy breaches.

Based on the article text, it’s only citing things like how long you play. I thought most games collected telemetry like this?

Don’t get me wrong, if it was scanning your drive to sell data to harvesters, I’d be extremely unnerved. And you should definitely be able to turn this off. But I feel like even Valve has recorded things like “60% of players quit after losing to this boss”

I guess I’m glad Twitch took a side on that?

After Bezos went full nazi on the Washington Post, I have expected the worst of everything Amazon.

If anyone is done with the official series and wants some more, some indie games that nicely follow its success:

Gyakuten Live, a fan game based on Love Live School Idol - three cases in, generally based around lower-stakes crimes but with surprising escalation

Occult Crime Police, a series based on small town paranormality

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane, takes place in a world of magic where rules of spells are often a form of evidence.

Things could be so much better, but on a few occasions I have been pleased to see that even Trump can’t stop environmental progress. Coal will never be big again, and renewables are still the best way to fix rising utility prices; in large part because of what Democratic presidents have built over decades. Pro-environment groups are still doing their damnedest even in a hostile administration.

Just because courts ordered it…

I have heard that a part of it may have been unit cohesion within the military. People go through hell together in training. If, at any point along that line, they were able to remark “Oh, you’re trans? Whatever, man. You’re the one who’s got my back when I’m getting the mounted MG into position.” then federal discrimination may have actually ruffled some real army feathers.

I’m imagining something like being able to go to a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation. They wouldn’t be granted rights to record that information permanently, but would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.

This would rely on professional trust - that the people you show your info to will not record it; and, that if they for some reason have to, they won’t turn it over to warrants. By the same token, they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.

You’re right that someone engaging online long enough could be exposed. That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.

This is the one thing I hoped for out of crypto/blockchain.

You, commenter, don’t need to know that I’m “Brian Brianson, a citizen living at 123 Abenue Avenue”. But, it’s good to know that the person commenting is a real person who has been seen and verified by someone, as a simple true/false flag. If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details, then it could curb botnet opinionation as well as be useful for a lot of things.

One track is made from subgrade steel and has a risk of derailing the trolley. The other is filled with explosives and shrapnel. Do you change the track?

If you’re trying to say that a recording of a video game is not considered fair use under copyright law, then I give you the existence of Youtube and Twitch as counter evidence.

So, funny you should say that…

This happened to Persona 5. Atlus felt that they had a legal basis to make copyright claims on the game - in their case, circumstantially around spoilers (I guess because they wanted people to pay $50 to experience the late-game story)

And they walked back, not because lawyers were dismantling their case, but because of public outcry. That basis of public preference is what has encouraged game studios to be friendly with Twitch / YouTube, not because judges would rubber-stamp any fair use “transformative work” argument. That is also why many games have given explicit notices to say “Content notice: Please feel free to share videos of this game wherever you’d like!” etc - as it is a non-default judgment.

So, as strange as it is to say, most uploaded videos of a game is in some murky legal territory. Obviously, most studios don’t care and even prefer them to be shared for visibility - or took the time to include those notices to make it 100% legal. But when the recording came from an internal build, the game itself is “stolen”, in that the person playing it breached either terms of viewing or terms of employment, and then the person re-uploading it is breaching copyright as they had no permission.

If you want to work it through the other way, permission to upload a work is non-default. You need to provide a basis it’s legal, not a basis it’s illegal. In many cases, it’s “I made this”. For 99.9% of video game content, it’s “the developer is okay with it”.

If something that would normally be copyrightable is leaked, then the only people who have legal rights to that work are still the original owners. Anyone taking/sharing it is breaching copyright.

Different case for something someone recorded/created themselves, ex recording police abuse on their phone.

I know some people have a misguided view of “But you didn’t register copyright, it’s not copyrighted”. That’s the opposite of how it works. Rights are granted at time of creation; copyright is a “granted” right as part of sale/viewing managing how something can be shared.

Otherwise, a photographer that takes a picture of a rare Snipe can have that photo “legally” stolen before they make it to a lawyer.

I am American, but I’m lucky enough to live in a city where bikes are relatively practical.

I tend to use these platforms without feeling I’m “committed”. I’ve abandoned things like Reddit before, and can likely do so again.

But I can see with the organization levels of channels that others are not thinking the same way.

Buy a bike, and often that sense of freedom comes back.

Still getting around, still able to use public transit at its best, but also able to fill in the other parts of trips with a form of low-stress exercise.

I think every few years I’m reminded this game exists, and go in to try to check it out - and I still have some account issue where my email is in use but it also won’t send a reset code.

Mario!? Who would have thought Nintendo would revive one of their oldest properties?

When that’s characters, I just accept it. Like, “Oh, I guess I don’t get to try out this character? I’ll level up others instead and see how well I can do.”

I’m undoubtedly kind of frustrated about this “proving tariffs right” - but it remains to be shown whether this works. Very likely, even if/when they achieve scale, prices won’t come down for a very long time.

And it skips over the fact that there were so many ways to achieve this end without causing so much harm to so many industries that can’t do the same.

I play a gacha game and have spent $0 on it. But I can imagine that sort of psychological insulation is not quite so common.

So in a lot of ways, it’s just the Asian term for loot box games, something that western games shied away from a bit after the Battlefront 2 controversy and EU attention, which Disney got embroiled in.