Pretty sure spying on people who just want to play a video game without telling them or letting them opt out ahead of time is not only a bit immoral but also very much illegal, at least in Europe.
I doubt the form they have on their website where you have to know your id to opt out of the spying would hold up in court.
And that's probably why they gladly removed that piece of software - they would risk being fined in long term in Europe, I believe.
Opt-out as someone already noted, is available on red shell company site but I would try to block it in hosts instead of going on site where you can be again tracked. In a nearly ideal world, Firaxis would ask their customers if they agree for this e-life "improvement" of more accurate ads and whatnot else. In a perfect one, they wouldn't bother including Red Shell at all.
How so? The opt-out is sketchy at best. Also, if I fire up Civ VI, I'm not at all aware of this practice. Neither of these suggest compliance; they suggest non-compliance.
First, and the biggest, is you have to trust these scum. That they are doing only what they say they are and won't decide to do more in the future. Are they being audited? What are the notification capabilities and contracts when they decide to look more invasively?
Second, you have to trust their programming capability. Who knows what update / reporting capabilities it has, and how well secured it isn't (every time Project Zero looks at stuff like this they find holes. Every. Time.)
Third, the lack of transparency. If this is so awesome for me as a consumer, then these companies should prominently disclose it.
Scum? You're trusting hundreds of companies with your data everyday already. Redshell is regulated by EU as a data processor just like these other services.
Lack of transparency? Go check out redshell.io right now and see how they open up about everything they do pretty damn clearly.
Multiple devs who use redshell announced its integration in patch notes. What more do you want?
An explicit opt-in when said devs made the integration, and the game dev to not send tracking data be default.
Not expect every user to read all the patch notes go to a third party website and fill out an opt out form, and then pray the third party to honour your request. This is slightly different from expecting a game dev to do so - tracking is not their sole business model after all
If you live in Europe, the answer seems to be "indeed, all analytics without permission are not okay". If you live in the US, it seems to be "whatever you can get away with".
Gamers seem to agree that this company should not get away with this. Wherever "we" have drawn the line, Red Shell has apparently crossed it.
If it was beneficial, the company would be trying to give us their data so that the company could benefit. They certainly wouldn't just be taking everyone's data and providing benefits to customers not paying for that benefit.
Could you rephrase that? This software allows companies to give measurable ROI to for example community events or streams. With this they can actually prove that by sponsoring a steamer they get X amount of game installs. Everyone wins from that.
I doubt the form they have on their website where you have to know your id to opt out of the spying would hold up in court.