Monday, November 29, 1999

Even more Q3A data harvesting -- 9:04 am CST, Update by The Master

Well, there's been a few more posts to the SlashDot Forums from John Carmack on this whole Q3A Data issue. I think he's got a point. Need to have a lawyer review those readmes from now on :-/

When the article first showed up, I thought "It IS documented in the release!". I went and looked, and unfortunately, that documentation from the previous release didn't make it into the latest release. Sigh. Our fuckup.

Apropriate quote: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".

I remain unconvinced that we have done something morally offensive.

Yes, we could have (should have, meant to) included a notice that it was going on in the EULA, but honestly, how many people carefully read and consider every line of all the EULA's they click through? How much of a difference would that have made to people?

I dislike lengthy legal verbiage, but it is reactions exactly like these that cause them to grow. Every time someone says "Sue 'em!" over something, a lawyer proposes another paragraph in a license document.

The most upstanding thing to do would be to have explicit UI that asks on installation if you don't mind sending your data when you play multiplayer games. I would consider that justified if we were sending a detailed system spec. That is something we may want to do in the future. Data like that is helpfull in making good development decisions.

But this is just a driver string riding along with your game version. It just seems silly, like requiring you to acknowledge before leaving your house that someone might see you. I would rather have fixed a bug somewhere.

I can see that it is a slipperly slope to be on, and I can easily project it to a scenario that I would be offended by, but I just can't convince myself that knowing the reletive distribution of different OpenGL implementations is violating people's rights.

The system was set up to allow us to notify people with a one-line message when their versions are out of date. I imagine some people are offended even by that, but I consider that a positive service to the community.

Including the renderer string was an afterthought to get some good unbiased data to help make future decisions on. Every once in a while we tally up the numbers, then dump all the logs. That's it.

From the FWIW department: MicroSoft claimed the same thing when they were caught harvesting GUIDs from IE when users entered Windows Update. 'Course, GUIDs uniquely identify the users. IP addresses (unless static) DON'T. And there's nothing in the data id is collecting that identifies users either. And WHO CARES about a GL_RENDERER string? Good grief...

News for 11/29/1999

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