Is there privacy on the cloud?
Google, Apple and Samsung joined the race for cloud gaming and opened a series of questions on the subject.
Google, Apple and Samsung are launching ambitious cloud gaming services this year, making strides in the race to become “the Netflix of videogames” ─ just like any ambitious company today wants to be the Netflix of something.
The results of this competition are uncertain, but these announcements also give way to other questions regarding all the information that these tech giants will have at their disposal. Does privacy have true intrinsic value, or is it a concept from the 20th century? Who owns the fruit of our data? To what extent can we be expected to collaborate with private enterprises?
Let’s take it one step at the time. In march, Google revealed Stadia, a platform that will allow users to play premium video games from any device, as long as they have a good internet connection. Mainly, it eliminates the need for hardware that has to be updated periodically, since the service will use Google’s infrastructure and processing power. That way, anyone should be able to stream immediately in 4K resolutions, with HDR Color and 60FPS, regardless of the equipment they possess. If all of this works out, and that is a big “if”, it could be a significant blow to console and gaming PCs manufacturers. Stadia’s big differential is Google’s technology, and that’s its advantage regarding other similar services.
Only days later, Apple introduced Apple Arcade, a game subscription service that can be used offline from any iPhone, iPad, iMac or Apple TV, with no ads or additional purchases. The emphasis is on the catalogue, which at the moment boasts over 100 exclusive games, and the company has declared it will invest in the development of new games.
Stadia, for now, has only one confirmed title: Doom Eternal, but has created its own studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment. It’s lead by Jade Reymond, a former EA and Ubisoft executive.
Lastly, even though it hasn’t been officially confirmed, it was revealed this week than Samsung has recently patented PlayGalaxy Link, a platform very similar to Apple’s that will grant access to exclusive games from the brand’s smartphones, tablets and TV sets. This isn’t the company’s first foray into video games: just last year it partnered with Epic Games and ran Fortnite for Android exclusively, and also collaborated with Niantic to develop proprietary games.
All this is in addition to cloud gaming platforms by Microsoft (Project xCloud) and Sony (PlayStation Now) and the projects that Amazon, Verizon, Nintendo and EA are currently developing. They all have their nuances and different resources, but any of them could “make it” first.
This new projects, interesting in their own right, also bring to light a certain curiosity in the sector. In the event where Apple Arcade was revealed to the public, the audience clapped enthusiastically at the statement that “Apple Arcade cannot collect user data, nor information about how they play, without their consent”. What an unusual selling point that would have been a few years ago.
Google, on the other hand, has not made promises in that regard. Since 2012, the company’s privacy policy allows it to combine all the data it gets from a single user across different services. The information Stadia will gather seems trivial, but Google will know not only that games a player chooses, how much time they spend with them and on what devices, but also have qualitative information on how they play. “It’s a walking, talking Rorschach test onto which you project your decision-making. Are you timid? Are you bold? Do you take risks? What kind of risks do you take? What do you see and not see? Where are your blind spots? A good psychologist should be able to watch how most of us game and understand a whole lot about us,” explained Jon Festinger, a professor at the Centre for Digital Media.
Many Google users (and who isn’t one these days) voiced their curiosity on this topic. Besides advertising, the company’s core business, this information could be used to develop technologies yet unimagined. GOOG-411, the now deceased information phone line Google launched in 2007, was key to gather recordings and create the robust voice recognition platform that now powers personal assistants.
¿What will Google invent with all our gaming hours?
In his memoir, Wired founder Kevin Kelly recalls a conversation he held in 2002 with Google co-founder Larry Page, when the company was still a startup based in search. Kelly confessed he didn’t get what Google was, how they were going to make money and what they were trying to do. Page’s nonchalant reply: “Oh, we’re really making an AI”.
Almost two decades later, artificial intelligence and its applications are a concrete reality, albeit not fully explored, but it has also become apparent that what powers it is the information and labor of billions of users.
So, although we’re hardly afraid that Skynet kills us all anymore, there is an urgent need for a debate on the ethics of technology. Like almost all the ones that matter, it offers more questions than answers.
