NOYB files GDPR complaint against French game developer Ubisoft
24/04/2025 | NOYB
Austrian privacy and digital rights advocacy group NOYB has filed a complaint against the French video game developer and publisher Ubisoft with the Austrian data protection authority (DSB). According to NOYB, the computer games developer behind popular titles, including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Prince of Persia, forces its customers to connect to the internet every time they launch a single-player game, even if the game doesn't require an online connection. In doing so, Ubisoft collects a vast array of gaming behaviour data, such as game start, duration, and end times. Upon further analysis, over a ten-minute period, a single game established a connection to external servers 150 times, sharing data with Google, Amazon and US software company Datadog.
NOYB argues that, as the complainant in the case never consented, the processing is illegal under Article 6(1) of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because it isn't strictly necessary. This has been confirmed by a hidden option to play the game offline.
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