News: Personalized In-Game Advertising In Upcoming Titles

[News Bot]

Scythal writes "In-game advertising provider Massive Inc., acquired by Microsoft in 2006, has signed up or renewed contracts with several publishers, notably EA, Blizzard Entertainment, THQ, and Activision. Eagerly anticipated games like Need for Speed: Shift will feature the technology that continuously collects 'anonymous' information about users, sends them to the Massive database for analysis, and downloads advertisements to be shown in the game. All that happens insidiously, without the users' explicit consent and out of their control, which raises further concerns about privacy, security and quite frankly, customer abuse. Would you feel concerned about software that collects personal information and sends it so that you get more personalized ads in a game you paid for?" (More, below.)


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Ze-Tomb]

To be honest, yes, it does.
Customer abuse, stalking, fraud. All this and more could happen with technology like this. If the information in the one big database isn't completely secure, then wham, some cyber-stalker hacks in and gets info on people in their area. If there's a leak then, bang bang bam!, those people wont feel safe and will probably sue.

But, it would be nice to have local ads in around the place if there is any in the first place. Someone in Australia wont want an ad about some shop in the Netherlands or vise verca. hehe

Well, if it happens, I'll be wanting it to be with express permission of the customer and in some very secure database.

[BlkRb0t]

Massive Inc. are the same company who provide ads in EU too.

[domchristopher]

If it's truly "anonymous" information that's being collected, then it wouldn't matter if somebody hacked the database. I don't see why they need to collect much information, though. Wouldn't the ip address be enough for localized ads?

[MarieWoodell]

It depends how anonymous getting info like gender date of birth and things like that are. If you had enough fo teh different pieces you could work out who someone is. I have to be careful giving my real name out to people as its entirely unique. My surname is so rare that coupled with my first name it can only be me.

[BlkRb0t]

Google does the same too,

The better they can profile a person, the more money they can make.

Let's say you are a man in NYC but Google only knows you live in NYC and don't know your sex. Google is wasting ad space if they are targeting ads to you that are for women in NYC. The only way they can avoid that is to know you are a man, i.e. to know more about you. Perhaps they know you are a man and shop for men's suits in NYC. It would be better for them to serve you the ad for a men's suit store in NYC because there would be a better chance you would click and they make money.

This applies to all of your interests as specific as possible, i.e. If you are a photography enthusiast and own all Canon gear, then it would be smarter for them to serve Canon rather than Nikon ads. But they can't do that if they don't have that info.

Your name or other personal identifiers are only important as a way of linking data in various databases, i.e. If they knew your google Toolbar ID, name and address they may be able to get a credit report that lists if you have delinquencies, and then serve you debt relief ads.