Is Epic Games Store user data accessible by the Chinese government?

A thread on reddit rose to the front end page recently, decrying Ubisoft for its always-online UPlay PC arrangement, simply as well the new Epic Games Store.

Epic Games, known for the Unreal Engine and runaway shooter success story Fortnite, recently launched a digital store front to compete with Steam. Core gamers have been plenty sceptical since its launch, attributable to continuing fragmentation of digital store fronts on PC, and Epic Games' willingness to pay to cake games from actualization on other PC platforms.

The scepticism reached fever pitch in that reddit thread with almost 30,000 upvotes, citing Ballsy Games' Terms of Service, which seemed to state that any information you generate on the service can be used by Epic however they see fit. The poster extrapolated that it might include the sharing of information with Epic Games' investors, including Tencent.

Tencent is a massive Chinese tech company with vast investments in Western gaming interests. The Chinese company has also been cited for its involvement in China's somewhat terrifying 1984-similar social credit organization, which gamifies Chinese citizens' behavior. It follows the full general wave of business concern that global Chinese tech companies may be used by the Chinese government to access the data of foreign citizens.

Epic Games' Tim Sweeney has offered a response on the same reddit thread (thanks, DualShockers), stating that Epic Games doesn't grant Tencent (or others) any access to its customer data.

Re Epic Games store: Epic does non share user data with Tencent or any other visitor. Nosotros don't share it, sell it, or broker access to it for advertising similar so many other companies do. I'thou the founder and controlling shareholder of Epic and would never allow this to happen.

The language related to sharing information with the parent companies refers to Ballsy Games Inc. Information technology's a US-based visitor. This linguistic communication exists considering when yous purchase an Epic game in certain territories (similar Europe), the seller of record is our local (east.g. European) subsidiary company for tax purposes, but the information is ultimately stored past Epic Games Inc. Tencent is not a parent company of Epic. Tencent is an contained company that's a minority investor in Epic, alongside many others. Yet they practise not have any sort of access to our customer data.

The other language around data in the EULA generally exists to cover the cases where we apply third political party service providers as office of operating our online services. For example, our game servers and databases are hosted on Amazon Web Services. All the same these tertiary parties do not accept the right to utilize or admission Epic client data in any fashion except for providing that service.

Without having a majority controlling share, simply owning a stake in Epic Games wouldn't necessarily give them automated access to customer'south information. A security consultant we work with as well couldn't find any evidence that the Epic Games Store is sending information to Chinese servers, at to the lowest degree not directly. Given the amount of youngsters that play Fortnite, you would accept to hope that Epic Games takes its data security seriously.

With Epic Games reportedly banking $three billion in turn a profit driven largely by Fortnite, hopefully, Ballsy volition be able to remain sufficient without giving upwards any more shares to companies with questionable interests. At least for now, there's no existent reason to think Epic is doing anything untoward with user information.

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