EA Responds, and it's Interesting
Everyone's been getting responses to the Privacy Policy e-mails that they sent to EA last week.If you don't know what I'm talking about, go here and here to catch up.
Here's what's very interesting in regards to EA's response. The answer that most people got (including me) was this:
Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.
EA does not receive credit card information from Microsoft when an EA Account is created or products are purchased through the Xbox Live Arcade. In order to establish an Xbox account, Microsoft does provide EA email, postal address, age and gender. (We don’t actually receive your true date of birth from Microsoft – only your age which our system approximates to a date.) We do not, however, receive phone number, mobile number or credit card information, etc. from Microsoft.
EA maintains all customer information using appropriate safeguards to ensure the security, integrity, accuracy and privacy of the information provided. Personal information is never provided to any third-party without the accountholder’s consent. Should we receive consent, the information provided may be shared with one of our promotional partners but we do not maintain a list simply for the purpose of sale to any party who requests it. We are very selective and sharing information to key licensors and service providers. Customer’s can always opt-out of sharing their personal information with third parties and may modify this information at any time either by accessing their “My Account” page or by sending an email to privacy_policy.ea.com.
We believe this confusion was caused by an unintentional association of our discussion terms specific to Xbox in close proximity to those that apply more generally. The section you identified in your message, http://www.ea.com/global/legal/privacy.jsp#infoCollected, is titled “What is personal information and when does EA collect it?” and was written to address all forms of information EA collects in all possible circumstances.
Not all forms of information collection are combined. Most, like “click paths” which record the route that visitors choose when navigating through our site, operate through completely unrelated and non-interacting operating systems. We apologize for any confusion this has caused and thank you for your support of Electronic Arts.
Sincerely,
PRIVACY POLICY ADMINISTRATON
I have two issues with that. One, they didn't clearly say that they had never collected this information via Xbox Live account transfer. However, they were relatively specific in terms of the specific pieces of data that they were collecting (and they didn't have to be so specific, so points for them).
The other issue, and a much bigger one, is that they didn't say that they would revise the Privacy Policy to remove any "confusion." See, it's not confusion--it's poor organization inside the document.
That's not the same thing. All we're doing is reading it the way they wrote it. And the way the current policy explicity reads, EA is reserving the right to collect credit card information when Xbox Live account information is transferred.
That won't do.
However, and this is a BIG however, Elysium (Sean) over at Gamers With Jobs got a different, and better, response. Here's the last paragraph (and you can read the full response here:
We believe this confusion was caused by an unintentional association of our discussion terms specific to Xbox in close proximity to those that apply more generally. The section you identified in your message, http://www.ea.com/global/legal/privacy.jsp#infoCollected, is titled “What is personal information and when does EA collect it?” and was written to address all forms of information EA collects in all possible circumstances. Not all forms of information collection are combined and most operate through completely unrelated and non-interacting operating systems. As an editor, I’m sure that you can understand how this confusion could occur. Please be assured that we will take steps to clarify these points with a future update and thank you for bringing this to our attention.
I added the bold emphasis.
So in response to GWJ's query (which certainly qualifies as more of an "official" inquiry), EA did go on record saying that they were going to update their Privacy Policy.
Good for them. That's the right answer.
And thank you for sending those e-mails. Maybe seeing that so many people were "confused" gave them an incentive to clarify their policy.
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