The issue was raised on Reddit and the whole issue surrounds Bethesda’s relationship with ZeniMax – who own Bethesda – and the automatic settings for players with Bethesda.net accounts. As it stands, when you create a new account, a box asking if you’d “like to see more relevant ZeniMax ads on other sites by sharing my email address” is already ticked.
Under the new EU regulations, which affect all businesses in the EU and those that work within its territories (which includes Bethesda) – these options should be set switched off until a user chooses to switch them on.
Steam’s account settings are an example of how this is supposed to work. All profiles new or old – relative to GDPR rules coming into effect – are set to private, with users being able to “opt-in” to allow Valve to share their data with third parties. Bethesda doesn’t do this, instead, it limits the ads you’ll see to “ZeniMax ads” but doesn’t explain where your data will be shared with.
Users are able to opt-out of these settings, though you’ll have to answer a security question which only adds your request to a queue. To be fair, Bethesda sorts out these requests pretty quickly – I was able to change my settings and get confirmation of the changes within a few minutes. But the issue is that Bethesda – a global enterprise that most likely has a pretty competant legal division – is treading the line of its data protection scheme. And if they were to be found in breach of the GDPR rules, they’d potentially face a fine of €20 million if found to be breaching laws before being revisited periodically to ensure they were following the rules. Those could be some costly ZeniMax adverts.
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Source: https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/470915-bethesda-net-account-settings-data-protection
"Bethesda.net Account Settings Suggest Data Protection Foul Play" :: Login/Create an Account :: 1 comment