HomeNewsOnce Human
Once Human is the centre of a storm of data privacy concerns over a policy line about collecting government IDDevelopers Starry Studio insist they haven’t broken the law
Developers Starry Studio insist they haven’t broken the law
Image credit:NetEase
Image credit:NetEase
Following a backlash in the user reviews (the game was Mostly Negative on Steam at launch, but has since risen to Mixed) and on social media, the game’s developers Starry Studio have published a blog insisting that they harbour no dark intentions for your personal details - or at least, that they harbour intentions no darker than those of the manyotherdevelopers who collect your personal information.
The statement notes that if players are worried about NetEase’s launcher specifically, they have the option of playing Once Human over Steam or Epic Games Store.
Again - and at the risk of being a brow-beating mollycoddler and trying to set you homework - it’s worth reading those documents in full if you have anxieties about how the games in question are handling your info.
My fairly unremarkable tl;dr: I think it is generally a bad thing that video games sponge up so much of our personal data, especially in countries whose governments keep their citizens under tight surveillance. Based on my own reading of the Once Human TOS and the commentary above, I do not think that NetEase in particular are doing anything out of the ordinary here.
While many of the concerns I’ve read about Once Human’s data collection seem sincere and substantial, I think there’s a touch of sinophobia to a portion of the angry reactions, and an accompanying dismissal of how much of our private lives we’ve normalised handing over to nice, safe Western companies likeValveandEpic. It would be useful if the furore over Once Human - which, privacy concerns aside, doesn’t sound like a brilliant game - lent momentum to a larger conversation about such things.
