[quote]A new iOS game that lets you trade real Twitter users’ profiles as if they were baseball cards or Monopoly money has been shut down by its creators amid rising concerns around privacy.
The game lets users collect and trade their favourite people on Twitter as if they were Monopoly money by crunching publicly available data to assign monetary value to profiles.
The value of profiles would rise and fall depending on how many people were competing to “buy” them.
While the game was launched on an invite-only basis, word of its existence would emerge as users were informed that they were effectively “owned”, according to the game, as in the case of Gadgette tech journalist Holly Brockwell.
Hey Inc responded by creating an opt-out page that strangley required people to log into Twitter and authorise the app first.
However, that wasn’t enough and US Representative Katherine Clark wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Apple CEO Tim Cook about how Stolen could be used to harass people.
[media]https://twitter.com/RepKClark/status/687753566782636032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw[/media][/quote]
[url]https://www.siliconrepublic.com/play/2016/01/15/stolen-game-shut-down-twitter-ios-app-store[/url]
[url]https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/411ght/happening_major_happening_feminist_representative/?sort=new[/url]
A ton of angry Teenage Girls are going apeshit on Clark's twitter.
[t]https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/648894596714336256/kg3I0tGz.png[/t]
Excellent slogan to have really
Honestly, after DOAX3, Valkyrie Drive, the guys who made Neptunia, and so on refusing to localize or release their games in the west due to this stuff is making me concerned for games.
People can't say SJWs can't take our games away anymore, look at this. Katherine Clark just fucking used her power to get a totally legal game to be removed and shut down.
Yeah... That's illegal.
Like, that's "Your political career is over" levels of illegal. You cannot coerce people using your government authority, outside of threatening to pursue legal proceedings if there is a legitimate case to be made.
Someone needs to lawyer up and sue the state.
[QUOTE=woolio1;49535653]Yeah... That's illegal.
Like, that's "Your political career is over" levels of illegal. You cannot coerce people using your government authority, outside of threatening to pursue legal proceedings if there is a legitimate case to be made.
Someone needs to lawyer up and sue the state.[/QUOTE]
There must be something we the people can do right?
This is beyond fucked.
She didn't force anything, she just wrote about how the game could be used to harrass people and then the creators of the game decided to pull it.
They could have kept the game up, no one forced anything.
[QUOTE=Electrocuter;49535685]She didn't force anything, she just wrote about how the game could be used to harrass people and then the creators of the game decided to pull it.
They could have kept the game up, no one forced anything.[/QUOTE]
She wrote to them through the congress, if you got a letter from Congress asking you to remove something, wouldn't you feel pressured into it?
They should relaunch it on the Google Play store under a different name.
[QUOTE=Xonax;49535716]She wrote to them through the congress, if you got a letter from Congress asking you to remove something, wouldn't you feel pressured into it?[/QUOTE]
She didn't ask to remove the game, she just asked for non-consenting accounts to not be available in the game.
[QUOTE=Xonax;49535716]She wrote to them through the congress, if you got a letter from Congress asking you to remove something, wouldn't you feel pressured into it?[/QUOTE]
That's not exactly legal obligation.
[QUOTE=Xonax;49535624]Honestly, after DOAX3, Valkyrie Drive, the guys who made Neptunia, and so on refusing to localize or release their games in the west due to this stuff is making me concerned for games.
People can't say SJWs can't take our games away anymore, look at this. Katherine Clark just fucking used her power to get a totally legal game to be removed and shut down.[/QUOTE]
Oh shit Valkyrie Drive has a game? On the[I] VITA!?[/I]
Here's praying that Bullet Girls gets localised. I need more things for this underrated console no matter how low my dignity would drop by playing them.
[QUOTE=Xonax;49535716]She wrote to them through the congress, if you got a letter from Congress asking you to remove something, wouldn't you feel pressured into it?[/QUOTE]
Letter through Congress? Don't you mean a letter with professional formatting? Because that's literally all it is. Also in America, Congress isn't the government. If 'Congress' (it was a single congresswoman using a professional letter formatting provided to members of congress) asked you to do something, they have no authority whatsoever to pressure you to do that.
Plus, her concern is totally valid; there are people who wouldn't want their profiles used in this and it couldn't hurt to only allow accounts that have opted in to be traded in the app.
Quit trying to relate everything back to SJWs and "censorship" Xonax. It's seriously obnoxious.
[QUOTE=woolio1;49535653]Yeah... That's illegal.
Like, that's "Your political career is over" levels of illegal. You cannot coerce people using your government authority, outside of threatening to pursue legal proceedings if there is a legitimate case to be made.
Someone needs to lawyer up and sue the state.[/QUOTE]
Wtf
1. It's not illegal to send letters
2. I don't see any coercion whatsoever. It's literally a 'letter of concern' and the strongest language I can see is 'I urge you'. 'Urge', or 'attempt to persuade' is not on the same level as 'coerce', or 'threaten with consequences'.
3. A congresswoman has government authority? News to me, I didn't realise members of congress were now members of the President's cabinet. Come on, you actually live in the U.S., you should know better.
4. Sue the state? What? What does the federal government of the United States of America have to do with a letter sent by a member of the U.S. Congress, the member from the 5th District of Massachusetts? The federal govt and Congress are distinct entities. Were you ever taught about the separation of powers? Apparently that's a big thing in the U.S. but I don't know if some people there understand it now.
I mean reading about the game, it's a weird meta-twitter thing where most people involved are targeted without their consent, and the (tacked on) opt-out forced you to authorize an app that (if you're getting the auth question at all) you clearly don't want to be involved with.
I mean yeah she strong armed some developer into shuttering a game which is wrong, but I guess I'm just looking at this from a privacy/user consent angle and don't really feel bad that it's gone.
[QUOTE=Take_Opal;49536002]Plus, her concern is totally valid; there are people who wouldn't want their profiles used in this and it couldn't hurt to only allow accounts that have opted in to be traded in the app.
Quit trying to relate everything back to SJWs and "censorship" Xonax. It's seriously obnoxious.[/QUOTE]
[quote]Hey Inc responded by creating an opt-out page that strangley required people to log into Twitter and authorise the app first.[/quote]
?
I don't know why they say why the method is strange either, obviously they want only the owner of the account to be able to opt-out, and having them sign in via Twitter is the simplest way to do that.
Though, I don't even see how the use of publicly available information for trading cards is somehow enabling harassment.
I heard that there was some glitches and bugs with the game that let people actually change shit on other people's profiles. I doubt this is true, but the fact that they shut the game down so quickly leads me to believe that there must be some truth to the privacy concerns
What Clark says about it allowing online abusers to own profiles is just the dumbest thing I've ever read, though. Did she look into what it was at all?
[QUOTE=Take_Opal;49536002]Plus, her concern is totally valid; there are people who wouldn't want their profiles used in this and it couldn't hurt to only allow accounts that have opted in to be traded in the app.
Quit trying to relate everything back to SJWs and "censorship" Xonax. It's seriously obnoxious.[/QUOTE]
I ain't trying to relate everything back to SJW and censorship.
I just misinterpret stuff often.
I'm sure the people responsible for her salary are happy that money is being put to good and legal use.
I believe she's the senator that sponsored Zoe Quinn when she appeared in front of some Congress group to whine about "Internet Harrasment". So I'm not surprised at all really.
[QUOTE=Xonax;49536065]I ain't trying to relate everything back to SJW and censorship.
I just misinterpret stuff often.[/QUOTE]
Well just as a lesson for next time, make sure you read through the article and try to think things through a little better. A lot of stupidity on SH could be avoided if people actually read the article rather then skimming through it or even worse, just seeing the headline and then posting.
This has nothing to do with censorship, This has everything to do with Privacy from people who don't want it.
[QUOTE=OmniConsUme;49536278]This has nothing to do with censorship, This has everything to do with Privacy from people who don't want it.[/QUOTE]
People get told if the game includes them, and it lets them opt out any time. You don't need to remove the entire fucking game for "privacy".
[QUOTE=Grandzeit;49536306]People get told if the game includes them, and it lets them opt out any time. You don't need to remove the entire fucking game for "privacy".[/QUOTE]
The devs removed it themselves. They deemed it would be necessary to remove and we do not know their motives for doing so. Nowhere in that letter did she demand, request it be removed from the app store.
She wrote a professional formatted Congressional letter, the Dev's then decided to take the game down. In no time was anything forced. More like an airing of grievances, in which the Dev's literally agreed and took down the game until they themselves can fully fix any potential issue. [media]https://twitter.com/getstolen/status/687767495134941184[/media]
um 1st amendment lady? remember there is one before the 2nd and more after it...
[QUOTE=Sableye;49536341]um 1st amendment lady? remember there is one before the 2nd and more after it...[/QUOTE]
Did you even read the article or letter? Please provide an example where anyone's first amendment was challenged or voided.
There is a sea of examples to make fun of SJW-like behavior so I see no need to try and manufacture some.
I personally wouldn't really care about my profile being used for something like this, and I don't really think it's as dangerous as she thinks since all of the data the app gets is public anyway, and [URL="https://dev.twitter.com/web/embedded-timelines"]this thing[/URL] also exists which could be pretty harmful too.
I like the idea for the app, and I think they should relaunch it with a "If you want to use this app you need to sign up with Twitter, and you will become a trading card too" kind of policy.
And Twitter needs a "opt out of third party app" settings.
[QUOTE=Take_Opal;49536360]Did you even read the article or letter? Please provide an example where anyone's first amendment was challenged or voided.[/QUOTE]
Games are works of art, covered by the first amendment which has been interpreted to cover art as well as published media, and since the data they used is all publicly available they don't actually need permission from people to use it, so ya you can't actually shut them down because you don't like them
[editline]15th January 2016[/editline]
At the same time if this congresswoman were actually interested in preventing people's identities and such from being bought and sold then she should be doing something to stop apple and Google from already doing that. More and more database breaches will happen as long as people's IDs are a currency, there's no reason for an agency to have 40+ years of personnel records decades after they've died, delete the sensitive stuff and move on
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