Bethesda may well have breached General Data Protection Regulation with the way they've been pushing ads for Zenimax products (who Bethesda operates under) through the use of the Bethesda Account creation process.
As you surely know by now, modern Bethesda games such as Fallout 76 and, potentially, Rage 2, do not use Steam, but Bethesda.net, and this means the creation of new user accounts for buyers. Turns out, Bethesda has been pushing ads for other Zenimax products in a particularly underhanded way.
According to a recent Reddit post, a user has noticed that upon the creation of a brand new Bethesda.net account, users automatically opt into seeing Zenimax-related ads on other websites, which is a major no-no according to GDPR, and is moderately worrying even without it.
Furthermore, there seems to be no option to disable this upon the creation of one's Bethesda.net account. Instead, you can only choose to shut down Bethesda's ad peddling once you've already created your account, and the option is buried in menus that many users are unlikely to sift through.
In accordance with GDPR (which is only valid in the areas of the European Union) such aggressive advertising techniques ought to be opt-in, with them disabled by default. For a concrete example of companies acting according to GDPR, look no further than Steam, where all newly-created user accounts are set to private. It is only afterwards that users have the option to deliberately make their data public.
Another Reddit user has put things quite succinctly: "This is giving consent for them to send off your information to 3rd parties who they don't even name, and saying it will have an impact on your experience on other websites. This means you have no guarantees in how your data is being handled."
Let's see if Bethesda and/or Zenimax do anything about this in the coming days.
Source info: the original post got removed by r/games moderators, but the author provided us with a handy link to reference instead! You can find it at the bottom of this article, under 'source'.
