S2E1 - Mobile Gaming & You - How Deep Are They Looking

Now, this week we are going to do a deep dive into mobile gaming apps, what they are, how we use them and the way it’s changing our understanding of what it me ans to have free will, privacy and how we behave as human beings.

Let’s jump right in!

So, I thought I’d kick off season two by covering something that we have all used. When I say everyone, I literally mean every single person – well except for newly born babies.

I was sitting in my living room chatting with my younger sister a few weeks ago and she mentioned that she had been receiving a whole bunch of spam calls. Every few hours, her phone would start ringing and that new but still alarming caller ID alert, would pop up indicating that it was likely a spam call. She’d ignore it and wait until it stopped and then she’d continue playing games on her phone.

When she mentioned this, I immediately remembered during the whole face tune app craze – people had noticed that the app was uploading photos from not only their phone camera roll but also their cloud photos to the Face tune servers across the world.

I’ll definitely be doing a full episode on Face Tune later on this season so watch out for that.

Anyway, after getting off the phone I started doing some research some popular games that are offered on the apple store for download.

These games are usually free or include some sort of in app purchases which is a new thing that apple is encouraging game or app developers to implement.

In particular I’d like to dive into two specific games Mr. Bullet & Train Taxi

Let’s go through some aspects of publicly available information about their developers, their privacy policies, how they use our data and how they change the way we behave.

When you google Mr. Bullet or Taxi Train, two of the most downloaded games out there you’ll notice a few things.

The Privacy Policy:

Mr. Bullet which is owned by AppLovin a California based company does have a privacy policy. It’s short and to the point. However there are some key points that stuck out to me while going through them.

1. When you use our Services, you may give us your contact information directly on our website, generally your name and email address. We also collect certain information and data, such as your application usage, access, session times and in-app purchases, your unique device ID, hardware type, the version of your operating system (“OS”), your device name, your name, email address and cover photos (if you have connected to Facebook or Google+), and your general (city/country) location (based on your Internet Protocol (“IP”) address). – You can opt out of the notifications but you cannot opt out of the tracking

2. Understand you and your preferences to enhance your experience and enjoyment using our Services

3. Deliver advertising and marketing and promotional information to you;

4. Link or combine it with other information we get from third parties, to help understand your preferences and provide you with better services.

5. They do share your information with “Third Parties” and they state the following -> The third parties may have access to and collect data and information about you, such as your device identifier, geo-location information, IP address, application usage, access and session times, applications present on the device or in use at a particular time on the device, and your viewing of and interactions with advertising, for the purpose of providing their services, including, for example, enabling, providing and delivering advertising as described in further detail below.

6. For those who live in Europe - > You may request to delete or restrict access to your personal data. We may postpone or deny your request if your personal data is in current use for providing Services or for other legitimate purposes, in which case we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.

7. And my favorite - > Although we make good faith efforts to store the information collected on the Services in a secure operating environment that is not available to the public, we cannot guarantee the absolute security of that information during its transmission or its storage on our systems.

Well, other than the above 7 very concerning points in the policy, I must say this was one of the easiest privacy policies to read.

Now Taxi Train – This is a game made by Sei Games LLC. I tried searching for a location but seems like that isn’t even listed on their website. And by website I literally mean 1 landing page that links to their Taxi Train Game on The Apple Store and Google Play locations. They also have their listed website and a link to a hiring page that is completely in Russian. No privacy policy to be found directly on their website, you actually have to go to either the apple store or Google Play, scroll all the way to the bottom and then it links you to a hidden page on their website.

This was also a quick read the main points were

1. If you log into the App using a third party site or platform such as Facebook, Apple Game Center and Google Sign-In, we access information about you from that site or platform, such as your screen name, profile information and friend lists, in accordance with the authorization procedures determined by such third party site or platform provided that you have given the third party site in question such consent.

2. They use Childrens data – “to provide children (as this term is construed under GDPR in EU, COPPA in the US and relevant applicable legislation in other jurisdictions) with reasonable contextual advertisements in the App.”

3. We share your advertising ID to advertising network companies for the purpose of them serving behavioral advertisements to you within the App. We use or may use the following advertising network companies:

· MoPub, Inc. https://www.mopub.com/legal/privacy/

· MoPub, Inc. Partners https://www.mopub.com/legal/partners/

The recipients' use of the disclosed information will not be covered by this Privacy Policy. If you have questions concerning the processing carried out by such third parties, you should review their privacy policy.

4. Your personal data are deleted or anonymized as soon as it no longer serves one of the above mentioned purposes and in any event no later than three (3) years after your interaction with SayGames has ceased.

5. You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes at any time. We will cease the processing of your personal data for this purpose after the objection. Please note that if you exercise this right, your user license to use the App will cease automatically. -> Basically if you want to use their apps you have to agree to having your information shared with the companies they work with

I will give them props for making both of their policies super quick and easy to read. That’s a move in the right direction.

The next step would be to allow users to actually have control over the information they do share with these so called third parties.

They could do this by providing a paid version of their app that is subscription based the recurring payments would replace the need for them to sell that users data to be able to maintain the app.

While users who don’t mind can use the free version and their data can be sold to supplement the loss of income.

Hopefully this is something that more app developers will start to offer. There are a lot of people who still want to be a part of the world but also to still hold rights to how their virtual identities are handled.

So back to the solution to the spam calls, I read through all of these and told my sister to go through all of her permissions. She did, and even though she had revoked access to everything including revoking Apples access to her phone use analytic data, she noticed that for some reason these two games had still been submitting data to Apple. We then decided to test out whether or not the spam call would stop if she deleted both apps.

A week later she texted me and told me that “Surprise, Surprise” The calls had completely stopped within a day of the apps being deleted and she hadn’t received any other spam calls since. Hmmm Interesting huh?

Anyway, now lets jump in to the way these apps change our behavior.

When you look up the two games, Mr. Bullet you’ll find the following descriptions on both app stores.

“Use your brain in this unique puzzle game. You will need precise aim and laser focus to take down enemies, ninjas, and many other bad guys you will encounter in the world! Travel to new lands, save hostages, and use unique weapons like grenade launchers to combat your foes. Start your adventure now! The one thing you have to ask yourself is: can you do it in one shot?”

The main page on Google Play continues to state that

“Mr Bullet is constantly updating with new unique levels, weapons and other skins. You will NOT want to miss out on the action.”

Now, what I’m concerned about here is the psychological impact of gaming that is accessible 24 hours a day. While I’m not a person that is against gaming in any way, I do have to point out how these companies are creating games that specifically use what they know about the workings of the human brain, in a way that directly results in the formation of habits that could end up causing long term issues for younger audiences.

In addition to the increase in addictive or dependent like behavior, I think that the use of free to download but pay to play features within the games themselves, could lead to an increase in gambling addictions later in life for these young mobile gamers.

I first began thinking about this after reading and article on Medical News Today where they explained that, “In gaming addicts, there are functional and structural alterations in the neural reward system - a group of structures associated with feeling pleasure, learning, and motivation. Exposing video game addicts to game-related cues that cause cravings, and monitoring their brain responses, highlighted these changes - changes that are also seen in other addictive disorders.”

It only makes sense that continuously playing a game which was created to target your brains reward system will lead to trouble IRL. Its evident that our attention spans have shortened, our anxiety has risen over the years and the statistics collected show that there is an increase in depression in young children and adults worldwide.

While scientists are just beginning to slog through the data, its not hard to form a case against this constant access to these platforms.

In an article on the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health they state the following: “It has also been demonstrated excessive smartphone gaming can lead to detrimental health effects for a small minority of users, including depression, anxiety, stress, worse mood, specific personality disorders, and low self-control (Cheever, Rosen, Carrier, & Chavez, 2014; Jeong et al., 2016; Thomée, Härenstam, & Hagberg, 2011), as well as dependence-like symptoms.”

Scientists and medical professionals continue to propose that the negative characteristics of an individual can be enhanced or further encouraged as one continues to form a reliance to their phone to avoid anxiety, stressful situations or simply as a result of things like seeking a reward that is always just out of reach. Looking at these studies, once can begin to reason that the methods developers are using to keep players interested in the game itself (for example, new releases of features either weekly or daily, as well as rewards for difficult to complete levels in the game are contributing to the chances that a player will begin to form an addiction to that reward system.

Sure, no one really listens to that “No one under 13 can use this service” line. If there is anything I know for sure, it’s that telling someone not to use something, is the quickest way to get them to do it.

The consequences may end up being severe.

Anyway, that’s all I have for you this week. I’m super glad to be back & creating again.

During my break from Creepy Tech I ended up setting up a directory of Podcasters and it’s given me the wonderful opportunity of helping them connect to each other and for me to find new podcasts that I now love listening to.

IF you’d like to see those, you can head over to CrossPods.com or TheCrossPods on all social media. There are some pretty incredible individuals out there.

You can follow me on IG @Tech_Creepy or Twitter @TechCreepy.