Google’s online gaming patent alarms privacy advocates
By John Pospisil
Google has applied for a patent in the US and Europe for a program that would compile psychological profiles of online gamers.
The idea behind the program is that in-game behavior provides an insight into the gamer’s personality type, including whether they are honest or dishonest, passive or aggressive, and their personal preferences. This information would help advertisers better target in-game advertising so it is more relevant to the gamer.
According to the patent application, games such as World of Warcraft and Second LIfe, would be lend themselves to this kind of profiling, because in-game behavior is likely to be similar to real-life behavior. Gamers using consoles, such as the PS3, Wii and Xbox 360, connected to the Internet could also be monitored.
The patent application has raised concerns amongst privacy advocates, including Dale Clapperton, the Chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia. Clapperton is concerned that the psychological profiles might be used for purposes other than marketing.
“Google is a US company and subject to the laws of the United States. If those laws say that they have to give the United States law enforcement agencies full and unfettered access to these detailed profiles that are being built up of all these people playing these games, then Google as a good corporate citizen would comply with the laws in that respect,” Clapperton told Australia’s ABC radio.
“Who knows, we may end up in a situation where the police come around and knock on your door because you’re World of Warcraft character has been going on a bit of a killing spree lately.”
Sue Charman of the Open Rights Group is also “deeply concerned” about the program.
“Whenever you have large amounts of information it becomes attractive to people - we’ve already seen the American federal government going to court over data from companies including Google,” she told the Guardian.
A Google spokesperson told the Guardian that it had no plans to launch the profiling program, and that it was just one of many patents that had been applied for in recent months.
“Google registers different patents irrespective of whether we actually intend to use them,” the spokesperson said.
Is this all a storm in a teacup? At this stage, yes.
Most people would agree that in the case of the Google search engine, the benefits of the service offered by Google far outweigh any perceived intrusion of the targeted advertising that is displayed when you do a search. I suspect that if Google was to offer targeted in-game advertising based on psychological profiles, it would also come up with a similar and compelling value proposition.
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May 15th, 2007
Bad vibes on this. As much as I like google, use google and depend on google, there are still things from them that I do NOT use. I always read the TOS and the Privacy terms. Some of theirs are really scary.
I’m no computer defense whiz kid (google is) but I do try to make it as confusing as possible to find me. I am also aware that if they wanted to locate me, there’s nowhere to hide.
May 15th, 2007
They even stole the idea and claimed it as their own.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167009&cid=13929372 Google’s do no evil is wearing pretty thin