I can’t find any articles or posts talking about this anywhere, so I just wanted to share a post about it. I received an email on July 2 from Afterpay about an upcoming change to the privacy policy which will take affect on August 1, 2024. I used a website to compare the text of the old policy with the text of the new, and found that they are now introducing targeted advertising. They harvest personal information about you and share them with third-parties and partners in order to serve you with personalized ads within the Afterpay app. They track information such as your spending habits and how you interact with their marketing messages, and they now also combine all of your personal information they have collected about you to profile you, they also get information about you from third-parties. Quoted from the updated policy:
Information from third parties about you, such as identity, preferences and inferences about you…
Just wanted to share this, since I can’t find any discussion of it online. Here’s a link to the policies if you want to check it out. These are Wayback Machine links.
They track information such as your spending habits and how you interact with their marketing messages, and they now also combine all of your personal information they have collected about you to profile you, they also get information about you from third-parties. Quoted from the updated policy: Information from third parties about you, such as identity, preferences and inferences about you…
Man I’m getting crazy strong WD vibes with this one. I can just recommend not using that service anymore. You can mitigate third party tracking but if such an invasive service has something to do with your ID or banking info, it is very bad for privacy no matter what you do.
By WD are you referring to Western Digital?
No I’m referring to Watch Dogs that is a video game franchise by Ubisoft. I knew people here would misunderstand. Sorry for that.
Ah, apologies. Yeah, I know what Watch Dogs is, it just didn’t come to mind. Knowing Ubisoft, I don’t even need to look at their privacy policy to know that you’re probably signing away your soul with them.
That’s why I have a separate gaming PC
I just only get Ubisoft games pre-owned physically on consoles. It wasn’t for privacy reasons but just because I don’t want to support them. The only exception is DRM-Free copies on GOG.
Well I’m not rich enough to have a console. And wait there are DRM-free copies? But aren’t they like 10x the price of normal ones?
That’s fair. I’m not sure about Ubisoft games in terms of pricing comparisons. But no, most games are the same price on GOG as other places like Steam, though unfortunately GOG doesn’t have regional prices so that may not be the case for you. Some publishers decide to up the price a bit, annoyingly, just because they know that users are willing to pay more.
Have you not heard of GOG? They only sell games DRM-free, and have similar sales to Steam. Ubisoft particularly don’t seem to like publishing much from the past 10 years though.
If we’re talking in the realm of privacy, it’s technically better than the other popular PC storefronts because they provide an optional offline installer for the game that, once downloaded, can be preserved into an archive and installed at any later date without internet (and can still be used if the game is taken down from the store). As far as I remember, they collect far less private data too, so that’s a plus. They have a giveaway going on at the moment that ends in 10 hours for an old game called The First Templar if you wanna try out the platform.
Are you at all shocked that what is effectively a payday loan operator wants more info about you to sell ads encouraging you to buy things?
Nope, but people should be aware. It seems most invasive policy changes in the tech industry fly under the radar because no one reads them to begin with.