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

Online video games are sophisticated personal data collection machines. Children, who play them most, are unaware of the risks to their privacy rights connected to gaming, and so are their parents. Unawareness of privacy risks impede parents to exert their protective function towards children. PROGRRES aims to design 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 identifies, 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 scientific research objectives are to 1° identify gaming features with highly invasive predictive powers; 2° link these privacy sensitive gaming features to invasions of privacy that are typified in the jurisprudence of the ECtHR and CJEU, in secondary law and in the legal doctrine; 3° substantiate the concept of “sensitive-by-design gaming features” (“Sensitive Features”) that is, features that bydesign are prone to expose children to the typified privacy risks; 4° evaluate such Sensitive Features; and 5° finally, develop a ranking system for games according to their risk level for children's privacy rights on the basis of the game's design.