Total War: Attila - Longbeards Culture Pack Review (Oddi Poddi)
Red Shell issues with game and developer response.
CA statement: "Red Shell is a program we previously used to measure the effectiveness of our advertising – it’s not spyware."
Concern: Common defination of spyware goes as follow: Software that enables a user to obtain covert information about another's computer activities by transmitting data covertly from their hard drive.
CA statement: "It’s a marketing attribution tool that helps companies determine which of their adverts are most effective. It does this in a similar way to other analytics tools by using cookies to generate a unique token from device information, and comparing that with data taken from marketing campaigns and game activations. In this way, the companies that use it are able to see which adverts are more effective. You can find out more about Red Shell here: https://redshell.io/home"
Concern: Again this fits well with common definations of spyware and its one of the most common uses for such software. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/guides/about-spyware as an example. Red Shell is hidden 3rd party program that the user is not made aware of on installation. The value of the data or what it is for has no bearing on this. This also leaves unanswered the question of what Red Shell is capable of and if the third party handling it gathers any additional information that it does not share with its customer. In an era of information leaks and data hacks this can be important and doubly so since this is software that piggy backs off a different installation. Software installed without your knowledge is not the same as a cookie that you can block.
CA statement: "However, while Red Shell was only used to measure the effectiveness of our advertising, we saw that players were clearly concerned about it and that it would be difficult for us to entirely reassure everyone. As such, the implementation of Red Shell was removed from all Total War games that previously used it."
Concern: This shows a clear lack of respect for CA´s customers. CA maintains that they did nothing wrong and puts the onus of the problem on customers being difficult to reassure rather then on the fact that CA should have sought consent for this information gathering.
If CA does not think there was anything wrong with this behavior, how are we supposed to trust them not to repeat it?