Sony Should Embrace Privacy in Their Strategy Against Google Stadia

Google is entering the Video Game market, and it reminded me of the business model of Delos Corporation, from a critically acclaimed TV show – Westworld. You see in the imaginary future Delos corporation created real-world video games slash amusement parks where people can relieve life in Wild Wild West filled with robots. The purpose of the park is to collect data about their visitors and sell it, I'm assuming to ad companies and governments. So it got my gears working when Google announced that they are launching Google Stadia, upcoming gaming platform. What if Sony follows Apple's lead on privacy?

Tim Cook took hard stance on privacy against Facebook and Google, even saying that "Privacy is fundamental human right", making it clear that their business model supports privacy of their customers*, while Google and Facebook actively monetises it, uses it for its own goals, or just bad and incompetent custodian of personal information. Apple can make this statements, because their incentives lie with getting money directly from people, they sell devices to customers, to get money, this simple relationship will get a little bit more complicated as Apple venture's further into services, but the financial model is still simple nevertheless – there is a direct exchange of the product and service for money. Google's approach is different.

This makes me think that this is also a strategy that Sony Interactive Entertainment, the division responsible for PlayStation and numerous game studios. Sony can directly attack google on the creepiness factor, it's only a matter of time before Google decides to start monetising the behavioural data they collect from video games. Case in point – Cambridge Analytica needed to show silly quizzes to only few thousand people to develop models to predict voting behaviour for a country the size of America, what can somebody do after learning how people make decisions in interactive media?

Image from Mass Effect game, letting player chose the response in the dialog, potentially showing what they like and hate, their political leanings, and other information.

Different games have different layers of decision making, starting from the basic navigational and timing (where did player go, how fast do they react), and going as far as having people decide where the conversation goes. Sony can push on the fact that - it sells consoles, to sell games, to get money. While it will be hard for Google, and their investors to ignore the fact that video games produce a lot of behavioural data. Effectively following Apple's lead.

Now, if you are working at Sony, and for some reason decided to take random advice from a stranger on LinkedIn – don't be too hasty. You can take a privacy stance in theory, but not before you clean your own house! You might think that you don't collect data beyond basic metrics and system logs but get an audit anyways. All those marketing agencies that installed software for free, vendor software by Adobe and Salesforce, and marketing agencies that installed software for free, can impact your reputation, so run an audit first.

* Some might argue, that there is not much privacy in China at the moment, but I don't know enough to comment on it.