Tanya Forsheit Interview (DICE Europe 2016)

Tanya Forsheit DICE Europe

It was fun talking to Tanya Forsheit on behalf of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Most of the people I chat with for DICE and DICE Europe interviews are game developers or game publishers. Tanya Forsheit is a partner at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz and the co-chair of the firm’s Privacy & Data Security Group. She is considered one of the leading privacy and data security counselors and litigators in the world. At DICE Europe 2016, she’ll be talking about “Building Communities through Big Data.”

While many people have a fear of data collection, Tanya Forsheit believes that gamers, developers, and publishers should embrace big data. Here’s an excerpt from the interview.

In California — where we have a lot of privacy laws — there’s a requirement that we include in privacy policies a disclosure about do-not-track signals. This is a largely meaningless disclosure. What it’s about is if I’m online using just about any browser these days, I have the ability to send a do-not-track signal. If the website I’m visiting chooses to honor that do-not-track signal, then I theoretically won’t be tracked as I navigate through it. Almost no websites respond in any shape or form to do-not-track signals. There was this effort over many years to try to reach a consensus on what it meant to respond to do-not-track signals. It was almost impossible. They couldn’t come up with a solution. California got impatient and instead of looking at the substance of the matter — looking at what’s best for the consumers and best for business — they decided to require putting a disclosure in privacy policies. Now, every single privacy policy out there has this paragraph in it that says “we do not respond to do-not-track signals because there isn’t an industry consensus for it.” Who cares, right?!? Why do we have to put that in there just to confuse people and make them feel like there’s something going on that they don’t understand.

The bottom line is that most websites are doing targeted advertising or behavioral advertising based on people’s browsing, including gaming sites. That advertising is based on things like your browser type, IP address, and device information. It’s not a “Big Brother” type of situation that a lot of consumers are afraid of — this idea that somebody out there is watching me all the time. It’s really not like that. This is a machine-automated process. It’s designed to bring people free or low cost services online, using more relevant advertising. And, by the way, even though do-not-track doesn’t work, there are ways to opt out of these programs through self-regulatory organizations like the NAI (Network Advertising Initiative) and the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance). The funny thing is, if you opt out of targeted advertising then you just end up with a lot of advertising that you don’t want. It’s not an ideal situation, but if people want free or low-cost games or apps then there’s a trade-off. People should look at it as benefit that we could never have imagined having 20 or 30 years ago.

Kindly check out the full interview to get more of her take on big data’s role in videogames, as well as to find out her favorite lawyers from movies and television.

Full Interview