SimCity lets you choose jurisdiction over personal data. Maybe.
By: David E Alexander
Tags: Games, European Union, Pdec Blog, Ea, Law

Minefold blogged five things EA can do to make the new SimCity function better as a cloud service. They wrote:

Like millions of others, when I went to play Sim City I was shafted onto a European server due to high load in US West. When I moved back to the faster US West this morning, all my data was lost. The cities I’d worked on for the last two days were gone. Save data storage needs to be a separate, independent service to the actual game servers themselves. By abstracting this out, it’ll make it easier to transfer data around the world and later cache locally for the individual game servers. … This is a minor point, but they should never ask what server you want to play on: just pick the fastest one for me!I’m not sure if the loss of access to your prior work was an engineering flaw or a design insight, Minefold. For a moment, let’s assume this was intentional.

Europe, Canada, the UK and the US have very different rules for what a service operating in their jurisdiction can do with your personal data. I’d suppose that not automatically moving your data from a place with stronger legal protection of your online rights (the EU) to a jurisdiction with weaker legal protections (the United States) might benefit you as a customer. Maybe the conversations you have with fellow city planners requires a court order or prompt notice in one place but not the other. As a global service, SimCity plays in many jurisdictions and it may be that EA chose to cater to a higher standard of looking out for their customers.

From their US privacy policy:

“EA is a global organization and the majority of the computer systems on which EA collects, stores, and uses the information it collects or receives are based in the United States and The Netherlands. We may also utilize data storage facilities located in Asia, Canada and/or the European Union. Your personal information may be transferred to, used, processed or held by EA in the United States and in other countries, including countries outside your country of residence both in and outside the European Union and Asia, and used for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy.”

Again, assuming this was intentional, kudos to EA for user-centric behavior in a cloud universe:

for disclosing to you where they were running your sims,

for offering you choices of locale, and

for meaningfully notifying you of changes.

Games are often rich in personal data. MMOs can be full of behavior logs, conversations with other players, digital artifacts designed and constructed in your universe like avatars and cities, profiles and character biographies, contact lists, presence and participation histories, recordings of in-game action, and your buying behavior. They also often track data related to your technical connection, information about your device, your location, and your network.

This data is usually innocuous, of limited interest outside a very narrow and playful context. In other contexts, this data can be prized as raw material for law suits, criminal prosecution, advertising insights, employment screening, or social persecution.

EA’s studios keep turning games like SimCity into realtime social media. Here’s hoping they give their customers increasing control over their own personal data.

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UPDATE: Minor edit correcting references from “The Sims” to “SimCity”.