A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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It’s not hard to see why the post was deleted on the other comm, the mods there take editorializing very seriously, you especially crossed that line with the FUD headline and post.
This isn’t in defense of EA, and I’m aware of their anti-cheats and many like it having kernel-level access, but how do you know this? Where is this coming from? How will it be magically installed once the deal is closed? When will it be installed? Who’s to say it hasn’t been “installed” already, years long before any of this deal thing came up? Would you have come up with that conclusion if Saudi Arabia’s PIF wasn’t part of the deal/mentioned in the article? Does this apply to every single EA game from their catalogue (IIRC some games aren’t locked-in to the Origin client)?
If these questions are difficult to answer, then there’s your problem.
Assuming default settings, the EA App runs a background service with elevated privileges (often as TrustedInstaller on Windows), and automatic updates are enabled by default. That means:
So, once the acquisition closes, any architectural changes to anti-cheat or telemetry mechanisms can be deployed silently as part of routine patching cycles. This does not require a new game release or user intervention.
This is a fair assumption under standard security threat modeling practices.
Security best practices assume that any installed kernel-level driver is capable of full system access, including:
So yes, if you’ve installed a modern EA game, the capability is already there. The only real change under a new ownership model is intent.
The kernel-level threat model doesn’t change based on ownership, the capabilities remain the same. But the motivations and likely use cases absolutely do.
It is a factual and well-documented reality that Saudi Arabia is:
In that context, PIF’s ownership of a widely installed, privileged software platform, with millions of endpoints and baked-in telemetry infrastructure, is not just theoretical risk, it’s an active national security concern.
It’s reasonable to assume that whatever institutional restraint EA may have had about using anti-cheat for more than gameplay integrity may now be loosened, or removed entirely.
EA claims that kernel-level anti-cheat is used “selectively”, primarily in high-profile online multiplayer titles. However:
So while it’s technically true that not all EA games use kernel anti-cheat, the lack of disclosure and difficulty in verifying makes it functionally impossible for the average user to know which games are safe, especially given the bundled update system that can install new software silently at any time.
Games purchased outside the EA App (e.g., on Steam or Epic) often still require the EA launcher to run, meaning kernel drivers can still be deployed through those channels.
Personally, I would’ve preferred you responded with xenophobic slurs targeted at Arabs like me than with whatever LLM answer this is supposed to be, but you do you I guess. I would’ve almost taken you seriously… almost.
So here, let me throw a random ass quote at you:
AI slop
If you’re not going to address the contents then I’m putting you on my blocklist
Where is the slop? That usually implies inaccurate information and/or sloppy sentences or word structure.
really ? the post doesn’t strike me as AI tbh
It’s AI, the tell tale sign is the use of bullet points.
That doesn’t give /u/dev_null any credibility but they like to be a good little boy that yaps at clouds, cars and AI.
In this case user /u/Samsuma was unsatisfied with my regular meandering writing style so I reformatted my points into a more semantically coherent package to undermine any possible pedants to come in and complain about misplaced commas and semi-colons and start legislating what the meaning of “is” is.
I’m quite confident the logic here in unassailable, and that’s why /u/dev_null didn’t have anything to say but complain about the formatting while being unable to address the substance of my comment.
And nobody can “tell” AI text. You can make it adopt any writing style, the only thing people like /u/dev_null have to go on is em dashes, bullet points and “purple” turn of phrases, which, if I’d really care to get these synthophobes off the scent, I would have, but I was more concerned about giving /u/Samsuma the tightest response I could without spending too long on it.
Because of people /u/dev_null just prowling the internet, I do recommend any AI user simply not disclose AI use, gaslight synthophobes into thinking AI text is not AI, inserting em dashes and bullet points into non-AI text and generally being hostile to people like that because they’re really insufferable.
The reason I’m telling you all this is so that /u/dev_null knows they can duck off and the more they try to bully me the more undetectable I’m going to make it, there’s really not going to be any winner for anyone trying to antagonize me.