According to NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights, a non-profit privacy organization, there are also concerns about the constant need for an Internet connection.

NOYB has filed a complaint against Ubisoft, claiming that the French publisher’s data collection practices have no valid legal basis. The complainant also complained that Far Cry Primal could not be played offline or without creating a Ubisoft account and logging in, and stated that he was shocked that a single-player game with no online features could not be played without an Internet connection. (This is due to the Denuvo DRM, which Ubisoft has apparently never removed from its games).

The tech-savvy complainant examined the data packets sent to Ubisoft while playing the game. He ran the game for about ten minutes and discovered that during that time it sent 150 unique DNS packets (queries and responses) and identified 56 requests to establish a connection between the complainant’s computer and external servers. Google, Amazon and Datadog were allegedly among the recipients of the complainant’s data. He then contacted Ubisoft in order to obtain information about the content of these data packets.

In its response, the French publisher said that the data sent when launching one of its games was a proprietary check on the servers to validate that the player’s account owned the game they were trying to launch (this is also a feature of Denuvo). NOYB claims that Ubisoft did not explain what the data collection was for or why it was sending packets of data back and forth between the player and, for example, Google’s servers. The lawsuit claims that Ubisoft should be fined because millions of users are affected by the data collection practices, and seeks a general injunction to force Ubisoft to comply with the European GDPR and to label Ubisoft’s data collection as digital trespassing.

According to NOYB, if we want to enter someone’s home, we usually have to be invited, otherwise we would be trespassing. They believe that if it is illegal in the physical world, it should be illegal in the digital world. And really, there is no reason to apply a different standard…

Source: Gamesindustry, NOYB