Privacy Rating for Online Games: Feasibility of a Rights-based Risk Evaluation System (PROGRRES)

Online video games are sophisticated personal data collection
machines. Children, who play them most, are unaware of the risks to
their right to privacy connected to gaming, and so are their parents.
Unawareness of privacy risks impede parents to exert their protective
function towards children.
PROGRRES aims at the creation of a risk rating system that ranks
online video games on the basis of the privacy friendliness of their
software design.
Unlike other privacy risk rating systems, PROGRRES individuates,
qualifies and measures privacy risks based on EU law and
authoritative legal doctrine at the intersection of data protection,
children's rights and constitutional EU law.
The system consists of: (a) a list of identified gaming features
capable to interfere with the player’s privacy; (b) the scoring of each
feature, based on information extracted from the legal framework of
reference; (c) a set of feature specific, privacy preserving controls to
choose from to mitigate privacy risks; (d) an overall scoring system to
rate the game’s privacy friendliness.