Comments on Wanna Play? Give Up Your Data.

I hadn't thought about this until last night when my Wii glowed blue, which happens whenever Nintendo sends a message through its WiiConnect service.

Really? Wow. It was one of the first things that came to my mind shortly after purchasing my 360 twenty million years ago.

Spoiler: we MMO devs are collecting data on your paying habits of our online games too.

When there's millions and millions of dollars involved over dev cycles that can stretch on for years, you can bet that every iota of prerelease market research we can do is worth it.

Wow that sure is a lot of words. And yet I can't find any that actually explain why this is a bad thing. Exactly how does it hurt me to tell Nintendo that I played their demo for half an hour?

Actually, if you buy Spore, the EULA requires that you connect to the Net every ten days or so, according to EA.

I'll happily trade that data for a non-garbage online system, Nintendo.

Yeah, how is this bad again, as long as it's anonymous? Do you use a QFC or Safeway card? They've been doing this for years. Of course, the Broadway QFC stopped caring about making you sign up a while ago, so it's easy to get anonymous cards.

Make sure you pay cash for everything too!

Otherwise...THEY'LL KNOW!

I totally look at this in the opposite way, and think its cool that the demo-downloading feature for the DS will actually now be useful, instead of having to have happened to bring my DS to a game store which happened to have their DS Download Station turned on, and happened to have gotten the latest update for it. The fact that Nintendo is going to harvest some demographics from this is a pointless argument of paranoid tin-foil hattery. These video game companies develop that trend information LONG BEFORE that Wii ever got in your hands, when they were doing psychological evaluations of people playing these games and systems well before they hit the streets. All they're doing is basically a post-marketing study to ensure that what they thought they were doing is right.

@7 is right - if you ever (and I do mean ever) use a debit or credit card when you pay for the groceries, it gets linked to the data records of your "anonymous" card.

Which is why mine is in the name of Richard M. Nixon - to point out it's not any of their frickin business.

@8

I bet you're one of those douchebags who likes to point that out in the checkout line, followed by a chuckle to acknowledge just how funny you are (to yourself, albeit not intentional), and then you talk about how it's not their business and you're oh-so untraceable and on-top of things.

Actually, no, I just use it and smile at the cashier.

Cash - it's not just untraceable, you can make paper airplanes from it!

@10 But some stores have stopped taking cash. I was at a large chain store in NY at Christmas trying to pay cash for a present and the woman said "I'm sorry, we can't take cash here." I really thought she was joking but she went on to explain that their computers didn't handle cash, only credit cards.

I like to think of that usage data as being the cost for using the service. Nothing is really free, is it?

Days I've owned my TiVo: 1,538
Days since my TiVo has been unable to "make a phone call", presumably to upload my user data: 1,538.

Fuck You, TiVo, for being so nosy. I wouldn't really care, if someone could tell me just why the goddamn box needs to call home every night, and just what data it desperately needs to send.

Of course, it's "anonymous" until it isn't.

Netflix recently dropped a big dump of "anonymous" data in order to get people to design new algorithms to improve various features. The prize was that the best new algorithms came with offers of cash and employment. A privacy group successfully connected chunks of this anonymous data to individual accounts.

Yay for "anonymous" data staying that way.

Ehh. Data-mining gets less objectionable to me as less content is available. Which is to say:

The internet. Lots of naughty things available on the internet, and if I want to look at something unsavory (legal or not, taboo or not, tasteful or not), I certainly don't want that snooped. Thus, people are very concerned about internet privacy.

TiVo. There's very little on TV, and nothing at all on broadcast and basic-cable channels, that could get you in trouble, or even be all that embarassing. At the very worst, you buy tons of porn and then TiVo releases its porn-buyers list. People are only mildly concerned about TiVo privacy.

Nintendo Wii. Nothing non-family-friendly is made for it, nothing non-family-friendly is downloadable. It's impossible to indemnify yourself, intentionally or accidentally, by demoing Cooking Mama. At worst, your friends laugh at you for spending three hours on the Hannah Montana game. Thus, who gives a shit?

Okay, it's the principle of the thing. Still. If this is the biggest worry in your life, I want to trade lives.

Oh, that's why it glows blue?