A lawsuit has been filed against the French publisher, accusing Ubisoft of sharing user data from its store with Mark Zuckerberg’s company!

The Ubisoft Store is nowhere near the level of Steam, but even GOG and Epic Games Store are light years away from Yves Guillemot’s own digital store. Their subscription service, Ubisoft+, is nowhere near Xbox Game Pass, but still has users from both Ubisoft services. And they give you a lot of sensitive information: name, address, credit card details… in other words, things you wouldn’t share with anyone else.

But the lawsuit alleges that Ubisoft used Pixel. This is described by Meta as “a piece of code on your website that can help you better understand the effectiveness of ads and the actions people take on your site, such as visiting a page or adding a product to a shopping cart.” In other words, if you browsed the Ubisoft store while logged into Facebook, your website data would have ended up in Zuck’s hands and ultimately been used to refine your ads to get more relevant ones.

But this consumer surveillance is illegal, according to the lawsuit, because personal information is shared with anyone with ordinary technical knowledge who receives it, and does so without first disclosing that it is happening. According to the lawsuit, this violates the Video Privacy Protection Act, the Federal Wiretap Act, and the California Invasion of Privacy Act, and therefore the plaintiffs, Trevor Lakes and Alex Rajjoub (both of whom have purchased multiple games from the Ubisoft Store) are seeking monetary damages on behalf of themselves individually and all others similarly situated, as well as an order requiring Ubisoft to either get rid of Pixel or obtain user consent to share the data. That would be another box to check?

Of course, the French publisher has not responded to this lawsuit (but it did respond to the rumors of a takeover by Tencent, which we reported on the other day).

Source: PCGamer, CourtListener, Meta