Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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What is the catch with Epic Games' free games? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by airikr@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Like what the title says. There's always a catch unless it's FOSS. So, what is the catch with them giving games for free that you can keep forever? What will the developers of the games get as a thank you?

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[–] TerHu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

can it be sandboxed in a sensible way? (on linux specifically)

[–] who@feddit.org 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You could download and play the games on a machine that is never used for any other purpose, but it would still be able to collect biometric data (mouse movement, keystroke patterns, voice if you have a microphone, etc.) and probe/fingerprint your network.

Short of a dedicated machine, the closest you're likely to get is a hypervisor-based virtual machine. Of course, that won't safeguard your biometrics or (in most cases) your network, either.

Such a machine would be safer if you never gave it network access, so it couldn't exfiltrate any data that it had collected, but downloading games requires network access at some point, and it would only take milliseconds for a "helper" process (perhaps quietly installed or launched with the game) to leak the data.

In general, hostile code will always be unsafe. If it concerns you, it's best to avoid it entirely.