this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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Does this happen to users in the EU? It’s highly illegal to gather data without consent here obviously. Even processing other data to derive location (which is personally identifiable information) means processing data for purpose that’s different to one that was consented to (if they tried to get any consent at all). There are big companies implicated here so it’d be easy to fine them into submission in jurisdictions that allow it.
The sample data shared in the article includes
"c": "ES", // Country code,ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.
Ah, there’s also this piece in json:
My guess is that developers are pretending to get user consent to get more money from the ads. Unity could be encouraging this somehow but good luck proving that.
Easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Most companies are so big, getting caught is relatively cheap with how low the fines are compared to their annual profits.
It's just a line item on their expense sheets, anymore, and most people don't have the money to get the justice they deserve in court.
This we can expect but there’s also a trend to idolise solo developers or small firms. Reality is that everyone can be shitty and therefore everyone should be accountable. In this case a smaller developer steals user data do defraud Unity most likely because they think they’re too small to be worth investigating. When we were implementing GDPR in my country those small developers fought this law as oppressive and unnecessary.