Clauses like this are pretty common for most online services.

There are plenty of bones to pick with ZoS, a notoriously litigious horde of bullies. This just isn't one of them.

max_only wrote: »

Have you read Square Enix or Blizzard's privacy policy recently?
I'm having a hard time finding the key differences.

I think this new language in the policy is in preparation for 1 account to govern Several games/services. When they do that a lot of third parties get involved to manage it, else Zos would have to build a whole analytics team in house. Would have to code all the stuff that already exists for customer demographic tracking from scratch. And would have to keep themselves hidden from social networks that could bring in more customers by the internets version of "word of mouth"/ "friend of a friend".

I get your worry that they are just selling bulk lists of Personal Information like if they were a black market or a bank (yes banks), or an insurance company (yeah them too) but I've yet to see an indication of that.

Anyway now you know for next time you sign up for a service: try calling them directly to bypass the website.

I have not, the key difference would be that they probably don't require you to agree to the distribution of your email before you can cancel your subscription through the normal process.

What you say could be the case, or part of the case, but the policy language does not contain itself to that case. The language is open to any thing classified as third party.

Rhoric wrote: »

The thing is you have to accept the terms before you can do anything with the account cause it's theirs and they can terminate that account at anytime. They own the account not you.

By creating an Account, You agree that You do not own the Account, any user names created on the Account, any Content stored or associated with an Account (such as digital and/or virtual assets, achievements, virtual currency, and other Downloadable Content), or related data associated with the Account.

Part one, paragraph 4 in terms of service.

And if you don't accept the terms then you need to contact support and have them remove your subscription as you no longer agree to the terms.

This point has been made before already in this thread. I already accepted their terms before the new addition. Their changing of the terms locks your subscription out from the normal cancellation procedure. Giving your email to third parties has nothing to do with accessing your account to cancel a subscription. There is no good reason why this agreement needs to lock out the normal process of subscription. You don't open a door and let someone set up a monetary subscription and then close that door with no warning and put a consequence to accessing it.

The only thing I'm interested hearing about is if you can justify why I should have to have my email handed out to cancel my subscription in the normal and expected manner. Anything else is meaningless in regards to the OP. You can't justify it, don't even dirty yourself trying. It's shady as heck, have some respect for yourself and set yourself apart from what is obviously wrong.

JKorr wrote: »

Armitas wrote: »

Rhoric wrote: »

The thing is you have to accept the terms before you can do anything with the account cause it's theirs and they can terminate that account at anytime. They own the account not you.

By creating an Account, You agree that You do not own the Account, any user names created on the Account, any Content stored or associated with an Account (such as digital and/or virtual assets, achievements, virtual currency, and other Downloadable Content), or related data associated with the Account.

Part one, paragraph 4 in terms of service.

And if you don't accept the terms then you need to contact support and have them remove your subscription as you no longer agree to the terms.

This point has been made before already in this thread. I already accepted their terms before the new addition. Their changing of the terms locks your subscription out from the normal cancellation procedure. Giving your email to third parties has nothing to do with accessing your account to cancel a subscription. There is no good reason why this agreement needs to lock out the normal process of subscription. You don't open a door and let someone set up a monetary subscription and then close that door with no warning and put a consequence to accessing it.

The only thing I'm interested hearing about is if you can justify why I should have to have my email handed out to cancel my subscription in the normal and expected manner. Anything else is meaningless in regards to the OP. You can't justify it, don't even dirty yourself trying. It's shady as heck, have some respect for yourself and set yourself apart from what is obviously wrong.

Where do you see anything saying they will "hand out" your email to anyone? https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/3926316#Comment_3926316

Hey guys, just to clear things up here, we will never sell your information and there are no plans to add in-game advertising to ESO. The updated privacy policy gives us the ability to better provide you with more personalized updates and new information on the game.

Gina Bruno
Community Manager - The Elder Scrolls Online

The only way to completely, totally ensure they don't have any of your information is to send a letter, registered to make sure someone gets it, to have your account deleted. Not your sub cancelled, but your account deleted. If you don't trust their statements that they will not "hand out" your email, then you have no assurances that they will not "hand out" other account information. Only way to be safe is to get rid of everything.

learn2read:

We may partner with third party ad networks to either display advertising on our website or to manage our advertising on other websites. We and our ad network partners use cookies, web beacons and other tools to collect information about your activities on this and other websites, as well as your IP address and location information, to provide you targeted advertising based upon your interests and to evaluate the success of their advertising.

For example, we may work with Facebook (see their privacy policy, and ad preferences page) to display targeted ads to you in Facebook. We may also work with others, such as Google Ads and DoubleClick (see their privacy policy, and ad preferences page), and Weborama (see their privacy policy and opt out page), to display ads to you on other third party sites, based on your use of our products, activities on our sites and services, or other interactions with us. We may also, unless you have opted out, share certain information (such as your email address) with these and other third parties to assist them in better targeting our users within their services; you can opt-out of our sharing your personal information to target you this way by emailing us at ads@zenimax.com. We will process your opt out in a reasonable amount of time; please note, that your opt out is only effective on a going-forward basis and not with respect to any information we have previously shared for these purposes. As noted above, you may also control how Google, Facebook and other third parties display certain ads to you, as explained further in their respective privacy policies and ad preferences pages.

See: https://account.elderscrollsonline.com/privacy-policy
Furthermore: If they aren't selling they are giving it away for free. Otherwise such a privacy statement wouldn't make any sense. But @ZOS_GinaBruno may try to correct me here if I'm wrong.

edit: just to comment the last part: by deleting you mean adding a "deleted" flag in the database right? because that's what often happens.

JKorr wrote: »

InvitationNotFound wrote: »

JKorr wrote: »

Armitas wrote: »

Rhoric wrote: »

The thing is you have to accept the terms before you can do anything with the account cause it's theirs and they can terminate that account at anytime. They own the account not you.

By creating an Account, You agree that You do not own the Account, any user names created on the Account, any Content stored or associated with an Account (such as digital and/or virtual assets, achievements, virtual currency, and other Downloadable Content), or related data associated with the Account.

Part one, paragraph 4 in terms of service.

And if you don't accept the terms then you need to contact support and have them remove your subscription as you no longer agree to the terms.

This point has been made before already in this thread. I already accepted their terms before the new addition. Their changing of the terms locks your subscription out from the normal cancellation procedure. Giving your email to third parties has nothing to do with accessing your account to cancel a subscription. There is no good reason why this agreement needs to lock out the normal process of subscription. You don't open a door and let someone set up a monetary subscription and then close that door with no warning and put a consequence to accessing it.

The only thing I'm interested hearing about is if you can justify why I should have to have my email handed out to cancel my subscription in the normal and expected manner. Anything else is meaningless in regards to the OP. You can't justify it, don't even dirty yourself trying. It's shady as heck, have some respect for yourself and set yourself apart from what is obviously wrong.

Where do you see anything saying they will "hand out" your email to anyone? https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/3926316#Comment_3926316

Hey guys, just to clear things up here, we will never sell your information and there are no plans to add in-game advertising to ESO. The updated privacy policy gives us the ability to better provide you with more personalized updates and new information on the game.

Gina Bruno
Community Manager - The Elder Scrolls Online

The only way to completely, totally ensure they don't have any of your information is to send a letter, registered to make sure someone gets it, to have your account deleted. Not your sub cancelled, but your account deleted. If you don't trust their statements that they will not "hand out" your email, then you have no assurances that they will not "hand out" other account information. Only way to be safe is to get rid of everything.

learn2read:

We may partner with third party ad networks to either display advertising on our website or to manage our advertising on other websites. We and our ad network partners use cookies, web beacons and other tools to collect information about your activities on this and other websites, as well as your IP address and location information, to provide you targeted advertising based upon your interests and to evaluate the success of their advertising.

For example, we may work with Facebook (see their privacy policy, and ad preferences page) to display targeted ads to you in Facebook. We may also work with others, such as Google Ads and DoubleClick (see their privacy policy, and ad preferences page), and Weborama (see their privacy policy and opt out page), to display ads to you on other third party sites, based on your use of our products, activities on our sites and services, or other interactions with us. We may also, unless you have opted out, share certain information (such as your email address) with these and other third parties to assist them in better targeting our users within their services; you can opt-out of our sharing your personal information to target you this way by emailing us at ads@zenimax.com. We will process your opt out in a reasonable amount of time; please note, that your opt out is only effective on a going-forward basis and not with respect to any information we have previously shared for these purposes. As noted above, you may also control how Google, Facebook and other third parties display certain ads to you, as explained further in their respective privacy policies and ad preferences pages.

See: https://account.elderscrollsonline.com/privacy-policy
Furthermore: If they aren't selling they are giving it away for free. Otherwise such a privacy statement wouldn't make any sense. But @ZOS_GinaBruno may try to correct me here if I'm wrong.

edit: just to comment the last part: by deleting you mean adding a "deleted" flag in the database right? because that's what often happens.

Did read. :shrug: I already followed the opt out instructions for here, went to the other sites and opted out for the other things.
"We and our ad network partners use cookies, web beacons and other tools to collect information about your activities on this and other websites, as well as your IP address and location information, to provide you targeted advertising based upon your interests and to evaluate the success of their advertising." does not say "WE WILL SELL YOUR EMAIL TO THE WORLD". Send the email to opt out, then agree and cancel your sub. They won't use your email from the opt-out going forward.

I know my information is out there and there will never be a way to be totally invisible; however I used a separate address for this account. It isn't linked to my main email. My forum name isn't the same as my in-game name which isn't the same as my Bethesda forum account. I had to make a facebook page for work. That has another email account, I added the barest possible amount of information, the facebook is set to private, I never added a friends list, have no pictures, and haven't checked it for about a year, I think. If they want to use facebook to send me targeted ads, more power to them. Likewise Google, which I also already went through all the opt-out steps for.

The privacy warning makes sense if only to cover their bases for legal reasons. Reply to the last part; even if its a deleted flag, what would be the purpose of sending targeted ads to a player who is no longer playing? The "cancelled sub/deleted account flagged" players might not be their target demographic.

I'm not sure if you got the point. I'll give you some feedback to the highlighted parts.

First part: It doesn't matter if they sell them or give it away for "free" to receive some sort of service (you know, no third party is likely to do anything for "free"). Furthermore, what kind of information they share is very vague as well as with whom they share it (they only list examples). Point is your data is being given away and the third party will be able to do with it what they want.

second part: well, you're picking a special case. your case, which might be the case for 0.01% of all users. anyway, I'll give you some feedback to what you wrote.

Did they write which mail address they give away (respectively do you have different on use for different purposes regarding ZOS sites and applications)? No chance for any social engineering attacks or to otherwise abuse that data? Did you use fake data for signing up here (because you know, that data could be shared) which might be a violation of their ToS?

Furthermore, talking about Facebook or Google is kind of irrelevant as they were used as example above. You have no idea with whom it will be really shared.

third part:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/3931342/#Comment_3931342
->

InvitationNotFound wrote: »

Furthermore, IT systems have vulnerabilities. A system that is 100% secure doesn’t exist (which isn’t a justification to store it everywhere as it is senseless to protect it at all) and security costs money. Many people in companies unfortunately believe that is the right spot to save money to make a bigger profit. You know, nothing ever happened (not that they would realize when something bad would happen) and by investing in IT security we can’t see any improvement in anything.
So what you prefer is to spread your data amongst companies with a relatively bad reputation regarding such issues. Well, fine for you. Your problem. Pretending everyone else is paranoid or wrong simply shows that you have no idea what you’re talking about and fit my description pretty well.

Besides the comment was just to illustrate that the effort of getting your things deleted might be pretty useless as they are still there and might be abused.


and back again to the issue:
it actually is pretty simple. they way it is implemented is a joke as the OP would have to share all that data he doesn't want to share to cancel the sub. it is a bad concept. Saying "he should accept it, change the value, opt-out" is flawed as at the data could be shared during the opt-out process. (opting-out and then accepting might lead to unexpected results...)

There is no reason why anyone would want to share that data. There's no gain in it (except maybe for ZOS). And exactly the *** up thing that's going on here. I mean it's okay if someone gives a *** about his own data, fine for me. I don't care. What i don't get is why there are people defending ZOS and blame the OP. I mean if ZOS would adjust the process, what would they lose? right, nothing. they might even profit from it. It's quite strange that such things even have to be discussed...