Legal/Ethical question regarding invasive 3rd party EVE platforms

Its not about whether it can be used to “hurt” people.

Then what is it about if it isnt about abussing personal information in one way or another? Thats why we have all these laws in the frist place.

Its not “simple” in anyway shape or form.

Changes in the field of IP, personal data etc are happening far faster than legislation and courts can keep up with.

Nobody knows how they will congeal, or in whoms favor.

Ofc they are, but that doesnt change the fact that Zkill in no way, shape or form uses any real life data. Its all virtual data, of a virtual world, owned by CCP. You dont own anything and you accepted it when signing the EULA.

Like i also said, RMT is illegal already, which leaves out a ton of legal issues. Its also illegal to impersonate a GM/Dev/other players, so they kind of already took care of that issue on their own.
Should they make it illegal to be anyone but your real life self and remove every single roleplay aspect of the entire game? Thats madness.

Thankfully USA isnt world police and they cant dictate how it works, we have seen that already.

It isn’t your personal information. Your character and all it does is owned by CCP.

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It is not even close to borderline.

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Plebs wont/cant understand the issues at stake and their complexity.

Law doesnt work the way they think it does.

Facebook has been critisized for shadow profiling for several years. Part of the problem is that they collect personal data, such as pictures, email addresses, names - without the consent of the person that data belongs to. This happens for instance when a friend of yours is giving them access to that data by activating the “find my friends” “feature” or uploading and possibly tagging content, that FB then scrapes.

Little did the US legislation care about privacy rights when it was/is them using FB as the quasi omnipotent surveillance machine it is. They do somewhat care now because the loyalty of a company lies with profits and that means the machine is useable for everyone who is able and willing to pay, including adversaries.

You claim that Zkill is creating shadow profiles. First of all, I think you are wrong about the “shadow” aspect of it. With playing EVE you are the one creating certain data, for instance lossmails. The in-game data you are creating is to be used by CCP in any way they want, unless the law forbids it. That’s what you’re signing with the ToS. Tiny parts of that data is available via an API, even smaller parts are available through the API without authentication (aka public). All of this is known to you, when you play EVE and yet you claim there is something “shadowy” about it. No. All Zkill and the many other sites are doing is to re-sort already available information. They only exist as a service for and within the context of the game.

Likewise with the idea that they’re “profiling” you. CCP does not make private information such as your real photo or address available. Zkill can and does only use information that is already public within the game. The “online hour” feature already existed on other sites before and it only uses those killmails available to them. So basically it’s even just a tiny part of what your in-game persona is doing.

I mean killboards had both positive and negative influences on player behaviour, but elevating it to the level of “profiling”, come on. Practically one may make killmails public only if all sites involve agree - this could actually be good. But it doesn’t mean that the current practise constitutes profiling and certainly not shadow profiling.

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Zkill doesn’t tell me anything real about the player so what do you want again?

I can think of at least five ways that it can. Note that I’m not saying it does. Just that it could if it wanted to.

As I don’t feel like a ban, I’ll leave it there and not go into the mechanics of what they could do.

Zkill only has access to information generated inside the server, and by the EULA that information belongs to CCP.

External information like personal information is kept outside of the API. 3rd parties can’t legitimately call for personal information.

Whatever you say.

That depends entirely on where the customer is located, and what nationality he or she has. There’s places where behaviour is a property subset of personal information. In the EU there’s currently a last stage consultation ongoing for a revision of legal frameworks exactly towards a wider definition of individual ownership of information and behaviour. If you’re from the People’s Republic, data points for virtual behaviour are a simple part of datamining for social credit mechanisms owned by the state where the individual has neither ownership nor right to what for example an EU citizen might consider personal or behavioural information.

The EULA is pretty silly when it comes to matters like these. Companies know this, and that is why they keep an eye on such things. The EULA is between company and consumer, within constraints set by anything that goes over the legal status of the company providing the EULA. Which is, well, a heck of a lot :stuck_out_tongue:

Right now, in the example of the EU, mechanisms that track and/or use data or datapoints of online behaviour are the responsability of corporate entities that provide or provision it, with an additional strong subset of accountability for those who use it, but there is no ownership status. The current debate is moving toward establishing ownership towards consumers. It’ll be another year (at least) before that crystallises.

If the law says no discrimination IRL based on race, gender, orientation, etc. Does that apply in video games as well?

Perhaps technically no but if a company tried that, like I said, they will face consequences such as “you can’t operate in any country that has anti-discrimination law”

I’ll do it because I see nothing wrong with saying this. For example, zKill has a tracker that shows a graph of the user’s online/active times. If someone knows you personally and monitor that, they can see when you’re not home and rob your house. Of course that’s just an example, and a bit extreme. But you see the point, your private information are your private information for a reason.

How many times do I have to say this, USA isn’t world police but as a company you either follow US laws or you’re not allowed to operate here.

I’m sure you’re fine with getting rid of the US player base, but you can’t speak for CCP on that.

zKillboard and similar sites have information about Thomas Tur Bando and Ima Wreckyou, etc. and their video game scores and doings and not personal information about the players who plays those characters.

Multiple other people have already explained this and since you seem to not listen I have at least a request. If you go to Court about this, at least dress like the capsuleer you try to represent and film the whole thing so we can have a laugh.

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If US law changed and it were applicable, CCP in Iceland would likely comply. They complied with the UK law or court case about ingame gambling, and we lost our 3rd-party gambling sites.

EVE toons are fictional chars, not real people with real identities. So it seems doubtful that any rule about things like shadow identities would ever apply. But that raises kind of an interesting question. Real people are interacting with real people, in an online game environment. They devote much time and energy to the game, and the establish identities within the game’s society, through their chars. Considering the amount of investment into the char’s place in the society-- should that char have some legal protection?

The easy answer is “No, it’s just a game.” But on the other hand, having one’s char identity somehow compromised or harmed could cause a person real damages. The same why having your dog run over by a car could cause a person real damages, even though they weren’t the actual victim of injury. (You guys can probably tell I’m an American. We can sue and win for all kinds of grievous emotional impacts here).

[Edit: I was editing while the next poster’s post came in. Sorry, this post is partly redundant].

Well, unless someone puts their real name as their character.

Dimitri is not my real name. I will never tell anyone on EVE online my real name. Nor is the last name true, I made that up, was going to type Morgaine after Morgain Ansaland in DarkStalkers, but then I thought it might be against the rules to do so, so I typed anything.

European Union already has a no shadow copying of user data without consent rule already.