Remember those huge Terms of Service agreements? Well, the Epic Games Store has a section that gives them the option to use their store as Spyware on your PC.
The Epic Games Store states that…
Any content that you create, generate, or make available through the Epic Games store application shall be “UGC”. You hereby grant to Epic a non-exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, prepare derivative works based on, publicly perform, publicly display, make, have made, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise exploit your UGC for any purposes, for all current and future methods and forms of exploitation in any country. You may not create, generate, or make available any UGC to which you do not have the right to grant Epic such license. In addition, you may not create, generate, or make available any UGC that is illegal or violates or infringes another’s rights, including intellectual property rights or privacy, publicity or moral rights. Epic reserves the right to take down any UGC in its discretion.
This section of the EULA basically states that Epic Games Store has the right to monitor you and send your data to their parent company, Tencent.
Tencent is well known for working closely with the Chinese government to create tools to spy on Chinese citizens.
Popular PC games store, Steam, has a similar section in their EULA. What separates their EULA from Epic Games Store’s is the fact that Steam’s EULA is restricted while Epic Games Store is not.
Epic Games gives themselves the right to collecting basically anything they want to. Steam’s EULA restricts them to only collecting data uploaded to Steam, and it only allows them to use the data they collect to promote Steam.
This issue is just another issue on top of the other problems with the Epic Games Store.
The store lacks forums, user generated content, user reviews, etc.
A lot of people are guilty of overlooking this major issue with store (so are we to be fair), but this definitely makes downloading the Epic Games Store more of a decision.
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