Microsoft and EA Privacy Spies

Be careful with that new EA sports game you just bought for yourself and your Xbox 360. With the NFL football season starting, Madden ‘07 is going to be the big popular title and will be available August 22nd I believe.

Did you know that when you keep clicking on “I Agree” when signing up for EA Games, you’re giving EA the right to setup an account for you on their system, which then entitles them to collect personal information about you from Microsoft’s database?

Forever Geek has the scoop via Slashdot via Gamers with Jobs site.

Directly from EA’s Privacy Policy: (my emphasis added in bold)

If you sign up to play EA games through Microsoft’s Xbox Live Service, Microsoft will provide your Xbox Live user account information to EA so that we can establish an EA Online account for you. You need an EA Online account to play EA’s Xbox Live titles. By signing up to play EA’s Xbox Live titles, you agree that Microsoft can transfer your user account information to EA.

Information collected will vary depending upon the activity and may include your name, e-mail address, phone number, mobile number, home address, birth date and credit card information. In addition, we may collect demographic information such as gender, zip code, information about your computer, hardware, software, platform, media, Internet IP address and connection, information about online activity such as feature usage, game play statistics and scores, user rankings and click paths and other data that you may provide in surveys or online profiles, for instance. We may combine demographic information with personal information. Prize winners may also be required to provide Social Security or Social Identification Number for tax purposes.

We do not require personal information to obtain access to any of our sites; however, you will not be able to access areas that require registration.

Whatever the purpose may be, we will only collect information to the extent reasonably necessary to fulfill your requests and our legitimate business objectives.

Now I’m sure I could read anyone’s privacy policy and find similar things, but it just seems odd to me that they don’t “require” you to give them any information because they can just get it on their own right? And they won’t use any of your personally identifiable information unless it’s just reasonably necessary to pursue their own business needs. Wouldn’t that include pretty much anything I could say it would include?