Not that it should be deleted in the first place.
Ubisoft is in the news again this week and people are angry over the whole “Ubisoft will disable your account after an unknown amount of time” thing. It has the internet riled up and rightfully so, given gamers are already wary enough about ownership (you have virtually none) in a physical vs digital environment.
Cue the dweebs commenting “akchumuly you buy licenses.” Someone hasn’t gotten their deserved wedgie today, and we’ll be directing you to the nearest toilet for your complimentary swirly.
Ubisoft’s explanation for their policy seems to be driven by Ubisoft-magic, that being stupidity and incompetence rather than the malice that parts of the internet is ascribing. No I don’t think Ubisoft management is being unrelenting cruel for the sake of it, that conduct is for their female subordinates. Rather it seems to be either a poor or incredibly liberal interpretation of GDPR rules regarding the retention of data.
Ubisoft seems to think that GDPR rules require them to get rid of the data for inactive accounts after a period of time, and their interpretation seems to be half-correct. I am no legal expert, however the commentary I’ve seen points to the rule being in regards to unimportant data and Ubisoft is just using its vagueness as a blanket covering for any and all inactive accounts.
And I should note this is specifically in areas covered by the GDPR. The US Ubisoft EULA doesn’t have these provisions. And it’s also clearly a very wide reading of the law because…well, nobody else seems to be doing this. That we are aware of at least.
Imagine being in a room with 1,000 other people and a sign pops up saying “raise left hand.” You raise your one hand and see 999 other people raising their other hand. Is it possible every other person is wrong? Sure. But it’s really, really slim. The fact that big stores like Steam are still not deleting inactive accounts under GDPR should be pretty persuasive that Ubisoft is reading the law wrong.
But on the plus side if Ubisoft does delete your account, you can apparently get it back by filing a ticket.
This does beg the question, is Ubisoft even complying with their own interpretation of the rule. Because if Ubisoft feels they have to get rid of user details, and they can recover the account, have they really gotten rid of it? If you can recover it, you still have it. Like if I flushed my hotdog down the toilet and then decided I was still hungry, I can’t get it back. If I could recover the hotdog, I didn’t really get rid of it.
Don’t read too deep into that analogy.
Ubisoft’s policy regarding inactive accounts is as nonsensical as their explanation for why they think they are required by law to do it, as is the prospect of that data being recoverable. But the silver lining to all of this is that it doesn’t actually seem to be permanent.
So why have it?
MMO Fallout 