European law change effecting online games

I do recommend Privacy Badger, a good adblocker, and maybe HTTPS Everywhere.

 

If I buy something through their website using my credit card? When I create account? When I give them address so they can send my physical rewards? Just few examples....

 

How about simply delivering content back to your browser when you request a page? It's silly how wide the scope is really.

 

Not that the article gives details of exactly what data falls under this law.
But if it's wording is to broad, I wonder if in game date would count too.
Knowing they can pull any data on anything in-game we do, would that count?
Johnny like a bow more than swords. Tim likes to cook. Sally likes to wear leather and she hangs with sue all the time in game.

Little funny but depending on the wording of the law even these little tracking could count.

Even knowing there for the purpose of tracking trends and balancing. It is still info about us. (OMG they might know I have a deco fetish )

But certainly our buying trends in the add-on store would be saved.

Could be tricky waters

 

Sorry, thats not true.
My company has used the last two months to create/collect about 100 pages of changes to the way data is to be used in europa. We changed contracts with other companies, with customers and with our readers. Additionally every webpage had to be changed and several ways how we work with data daily had to be changed. And it affects not only the way you work with digital data but with analog data (papers, printed informations) too. This law is dangerous and a bad way to harm the economy in european countries and will have a serious impact on companies.

 

Well it seems like fail Journalism is doing its work again.... Ragnarok is not shutting down its service in Europe. They are just blocking the access to the US Servers from Europe due to the new regulation. So all Europeans can and will be able to access Ragnarok. Just not over the US Servers due to the new Regulation. Still bad news if you have friends on these Servers. But will all get fine tund i am sure over the years so no one even notices.

Source: Update: This story was a miscommunication in the media. It turns out that while the servers are staying up, Ragnarok Online’s North American servers are blocking IP addresses from Europe due to these regulations. The European servers will be unaffected. Thanks, Kelekelio!

 

As long as I can keep gaming with all the great European folks across the water.

 

Well, I hope somebody will sue Black Sun Publishing sooner or later.
They definitely fall under GDPR by dealing with European citizen accounts.
So far they event failed to provide english language option for their website...

 

The EU has no power outside of the EU. If an EU citizen accesses services outside the EU from a company that has no presence in the EU there's literally nothing they can enforce.

 

It depends, if this non EU company has services running in EU they will have to enforce EU laws on their EU customer.

 

Only if it's running through an EU entity. Which for SoTA would be Travian. If there was no Travian involved they wouldn't need to comply with anything as it would be an American game with American servers. Being accessible from the EU doesn't open them up to any responsibility to the EU.

 

If we are talking about US. Then yes they are obligated to be extra careful with EU data: http://collections.internetmemory.o...tsheets/factsheet_eu-us_privacy_shield_en.pdf

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/2016-08-01-ps-citizens-guide_en.pd_.pdf

 

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172548/gdpr-compliance-requirements-privacy-notice

“By default, any time a company collects personal data on an EU citizen, it will need explicit and informed consent from that person. Users also need a way to revoke that consent, and they can request all the data a company has from them as a way to verify that consent. It’s a lot stronger than existing requirements, and it explicitly extends to companies based outside the EU.”

We can debate this here back and forth but as I said before: I really hope that Portalarium has taken this seriously.

 

Too bad we, in the U.S. can't can't steps to curb the wild west of data collection that has been going on for way too long. It's nice to see that the EU takes it's peoples concerns about privacy seriously.

 

So how does this work with games that use anti-hacks (like battleye)? The best way to do that is collect data from the players.

Also, if this covers ALL data, then if you do get banned from a game, can't you just request that data to be deleted, then you challenge the ban. It cannot be that simple, right?

*goes to rad the legal nonsense that was linked to*

 

Okay, so reading over this law is super confusing. "location data or online identifier" is listed as personal data. Doesn't this cover IP addresses and user account names? How would I be able to log into Shroud for example, if I was in the EU and said "don't collect any of my data", therefore they cannot store my account information, since it also links to my name, email and CC info?

Am I overthinking this?

 

No u aren't. It is the same with the VAT Portalarium didn't pay to the EU for a long time. They just learn now how to setup the game right.

Luckily the game is so small, that no one cared I guess. Now that they plan to expand the game all that stuff needs to be sorted out properly. However the new EU law makes it necessary that those rules apply to all customers from EU. Some games split their games into EU and NA servers. Others shut down EU servers because it wasnt profitable. We will see what happens here.

 

It doesn't matter what the EU writes down in Europe. The EU has no jurisdiction in the USA or anywhere outside its borders. It has no enforcement right, regardless of what their law says. As mentioned, if Travian wasn't involved Port would only need comply with US laws so long as it's staff and services are based on the US, which they are. The EU isn't the UN, the rest of the world has no obligation to confirm to EU law.

 

That's utterly wrong but it has been discussed earlier and needs no more clarification.

 

Like stated that is not true, I presume you never heard of the Privacy Shield.. And even the most worse agreement: The Fourteen eyes
But that is another whole nightmare...