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[Giagnocavo]Michael::Write()

# Wednesday, June 07, 2006
EA Tricks Players into opting in

Just got an Xbox 360 and tried Burnout Revenge on Xbox Live. For some lame reason, you have to play on EA servers (I believe it's so they have more of an excuse to get your details). Anyways, they ask for your permission to use your Xbox live data. The prompt looks like this (paraphrasing):

Can Microsoft share your Xbox Live account with EA?
A = Yes , B = No

This is the standard Xbox 360 convention, where A = Accept/Next/OK and B = Reject/Back/Cancel.

Then they ask two more questions, Can EA spam you with their newsletter, and can EA share your details with other companies. This time the responses are:
A = No, B = Yes

Of course, you're trained to press B for no and by the time you realise they've tricked you it's too late.

Way to go EA, thanks for just making sure we have a reason to hate your company. And Microsoft, WTF? What about making sure the user is in control? MS should not allow their partners to behave like this.
Misc. Technology
Wednesday, June 07, 2006 2:38:14 AM UTC  #    Comments [2]  |  Trackback Tracked by:
"http://adet8cv.biz/we-buy-ugly-houses.html" (http://adet8cv.biz/we-buy-ugly-hou... [Pingback]

Wednesday, June 07, 2006 3:11:56 AM UTC
Actually, it looks like they put the sensible, non-evil defaults to A = Accept, for most people who are just going to hit A for everything.

Can Microsoft share your Xbox Live account with EA?
- I would assume that if you want to play the game, you have to say Yes here, so the default (A button) is Yes.

Can EA spam you to death?
- Most people don't want this, so the default (A button) is No.

I guess you can read it either way though.
anonymous
Friday, June 09, 2006 5:40:27 AM UTC
I suppose you can read it that way, but I don't think there are defaults (it's not a dialog with a preselected answer).
It's more like like swapping the Yes/No button config... Every single other dialog is normal, and I see tons of people complaining about EA spamming them after using Xbox Live. But I suppose one could argue that they were trying to get people to not accidentally sign up. But in that case, if they really were trying to be nice, they could have used a Yes/No dialog and made you use the directional pad to select an answer...
Michael Giagnocavo | mggAT NOSPAMatrevido dot net
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