GOG Updates Privacy Policy, Will No Longer Use Geo-IP to Determine You

[lalalawawawa]

Finally some nice privacy reliefs! :) Now if only other distributors start doing the same!

We?ve come to the conclusion that there are a number of issues with using a customer?s IP address to determine what offer they are being presented with from GOG.com. A good number of users can find themselves negatively impacted by a policy of using geo IP to set their region.

For example, customers may be travelling when they want to purchase or download a game from GOG.com. In this case, automatic IP address capture might change the price or the content of the game they?re ordering (such as the default language of the installer). Further, geo IP data collection is not always right. IP addresses are not a perfect or unique identifier of location, and can report the incorrect region of users, particularly ones who are not using standard Internet connections. Finally, we?re always very sensitive of our users? privacy. Effective privacy protections for our users means that any data that we don?t need to collect, we shouldn?t. We only need to know the country that you?re making this purchase from, so although we originally planned to use geo-IP to determine user?s location, we?ve decided to trust our users and let them inform us as to the correct region for their purchase.

More here: http://www.gog.com/en/news/gog_updates_privacy_policy_will_no_longer_use_geo_ip_to_determine_your_region

EDIT: This means that people from Australia and similar countries can get the uncensored version of The Witcher that gets released tomorrow on GOG... and of course, The Witcher 2 which should be released this month... for a different price, depending on the country they select.

[Roger H. Veteran]

While this is gaming news i'll move it to the BPN anyways :)

(and yes i'm moving this after seeing posts on the story on the front page :D)