Originally posted by: Woofmeister
EA clarifies the spyware issue
here:
The advertising program in Battlefield 2142 does not access any files which are not directly related to the game. It does not capture personal data such as cookies, account login detail, or surfing history.
BF 2142 delivers ads by region. The advertising system uses a player's IP address to determine the region of the player, assisting to serve the appropriate ads by region and language. For instance, a player in Paris might be presented with ads in French. The information collected will not be repurposed for other uses.
Battlefield 2142 also tracks "impression data" related to in-game advertisements: location of a billboard in the game, brand advertised, duration of advertisement impression, etc. This information is used to help advertisers qualify the reach of a given advertisement.
So according to EA, the only data being captured is your IP address
and other data which was already being transferred to the server during the course of playing the game.
Nevertheless, I"m still not really comfortable with this. I think in-game adds are intrusive and distracting and I don't like being made a captive audience for a shampoo ad simply because I want to engage in some mindless fragging. I find it particularly disconcerting when ads appear in single-player games for products that were not even being sold at the time the game originally came out (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory anyone?) If you want to show ads, show them at the initial login and leave them out of the game content.
If you're not making enough money off game sales and related merchandise, maybe you should change your pricing model.