from my, apparently, dipshit friend (no, this is not the only stupid thing he's done).

Reading comprehension is hard. I get it.

Probably because borderlands 4 is on the horizon and sweat-gland randy caught some flag for tweets.

My guess is that it was planed to be good PR.

Yes, the government is going to get you by installing spyware in a game launcher that nobody uses. You won't care a shit about or vet at code level any of the 200+ closed source games you will play in your life because they're all fine in your fantasy land, but one game launcher is out to kidnap you.

You know the parent company has military contracts, right?

Same is true of any software these days, not just cracks...

If a game, application, device or EULA changes in a way you find unacceptable, after you've purchased it, you should be able to get your initial purchase price back. And if you paid with your data, you need to be able to demand they delete all your data. I think that law would be entirely reasonable and would do a lot of good.

This is true. Even projects with good reputations get caught up in shit like the XZ back door in Linux.

If you haven’t read up on that fiasco, you really should look into it. It got way too far before being caught all because people suck and ruin things for others.

I sometimes wonder what I casually believe because I read it while scrolling for something interesting. I don't have the time or inclination to fact check every single detail I come across.

Totally. And then these rebuttals are time consuming to fact check too.

I'm sure I believe a lot of nonsense from reading the Internet.

That's okay, we're just human. The problem is when people try to 'inform' people of things that they 'know' from reading social media. That's how these situations are created, so many people believe this because so many other people believe it and then repeat it as fact without themselves ever checking.

It's like a feedback loop of ignorance, caused entirely by people who care more about getting social credit for talking and less about saying things that are true.

Interesting. So the terms of service have not changed, and yet people are saying that they did. I wonder if there are criticisms that are still valid. For example, the terms of service that you linked:

• do not let me use a VPN (¶6.4)
• do not let me use glitches (¶6.4)
• do not let me own the game but instead give me a limited license to it (¶2.1-2.2)
• do not inform you about updates to their terms of service (¶10.2)
• force me to enter arbitration and do not let me be part of a class action lawsuit or have a trial by jury (¶17.5)
• link to their privacy policy, which:
  • does not let me opt out of having my data bought, merged, and sold through ad networks or data brokers (§ Categories of Information Collected, § How We Use Information and Our Legal Grounds, § Sources of Information We Collect, and § When We Share Information ¶ 5— all sources combined)
  • does not attempt to deliberately minimize data collection to protect user data (with the only exception of children's data, their purposes are extremely vague § How We Use Information and Our Legal Grounds, they do not anonymize data, and they broadly do not make the attempt to do so— I cannot provide a citation because there is no attempt to do this in their privacy policy)
  • does not specify the purposes of gathering and using information about any installed application on my device (§ Categories of Information Collected)
  • does not let me opt-out of data collection categories for specific purposes (cannot give a direct citation because they simply do not do it; instead, they wrote vague types of information they collect —such as "details about... other information related to installed applications" in § Categories of Information Collected, as well as vague purposes in § How We Use Information)

So, coming back to the original claim you were debunking:

They added spyware to it.

Your response was

No, they didn’t.

And after reading their terms of service and privacy policy, I agree with you. If it is true that they haven't changed their terms of service, then they didn't add it. Instead, it was always there. They have always said that they gather "details about... other information related to installed applications" on my device for purposes that can include merging and selling my data to data brokers and ad networks.