A response to this Chugalug note about EA including spyware and spyware targeted ads in Battlefield 2142:
I think it's already getting to the point where a Windows machine needs to be wiped, or at least re-imaged, fairly regularly. If you're a game player, I think it's part of the cost of playing games on Windows that you have a separate Windows image that gets overwritten every few months, and is used solely to play games.
And I say this not because of the particular instance here, but just because as I watch the various teenagers in my circle and their travails with Windows, spyware and other cruft attached to games, or at least to game demos and game associated stuff, it looks like gaming on Windows is already pretty damned annoying.
But really I think this is yet another nail in the coffin of the general purpose computer. They're trying to piggyback on the fact that you use that computer for other things. If game players let them past this line in the sand, the next is "we're going to root through your "My Documents" directory for keywords", or "we're going to root through your PR0N collection to find out what sort of woman you're attracted to and feature those ethnicities and kinks in our in-game advertising".
Which, to be fair, Google is already doing to people who use gmail.
The solution to that is a console with enough removable storage to save game state, like we used to have back in the Dreamcast days, or to accept that advertising is going to be better targeted.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Better targeted advertising wastes less of my time. I've repeated so many times that it's beyond trite that I'll happily give FirstUSA my medical records if they'll agree to not send me any more credit card offers until after I've had a lobotomy. If I only saw ads from products I was actively interested in, it'd be useful to both the advertisers (who are having trouble getting their messages through in an increasingly noisy ad space) and me (who wants to filter out much of that ad space, but understands that hidden costs are funded through advertising).
So half of me says "hell no", but the other half says "give 'em a keystroke logger and VNC access to my screen if it'll fund the content I want to experience and cut down on irrelevant ads".