Nintendo’s New Privacy Policy

Most of you are probably aware of Nintendo’s VIP star catalogue program on their website. In a nutshell: Buy Nintendo games; enter a unique code to gain “stars”; view catalogue; spend stars on Nintendo things.

Most of the items on offer are fairly pedestrian – along the lines of ringtones and wallpaper. Very occasionally you can get a limited amount of stuff that’s actually valuable – a recent offering was the Wii version of Pirates of Caribbean: At World’s End. It’s this sort of thing that leads me to hang onto my stars, just in case.

Nintendo are now using the star points as a way to force people into agreeing to their new Privacy Policy. I’ve recently received a couple of emails threatening to deactivate my Nintendo Europe membership and remove all my star points if I don’t agree to their new policy. The privacy policy seems fairly normal until you get to the Web Beacons:

Nintendo may place web beacons in email communication sent to you which will notify Nintendo when you open such email communication and, while reading such e-mails, will notify Nintendo whenever you reach a certain section of such emails…

…Web beacons are tiny graphics files invisibly integrated into websites or into communications sent to you. When you access websites or communications which contain such web-beacons, the respective graphics files are loaded from the Nintendo server. The technique used to integrate such graphics files into websites or communication sent to you allows Nintendo to identify you as the individual accessing the files, provided that you are a registered user of the Nintendo website.

Emphasis is mine.

Creepy-weird! I don’t want other people monitoring my email habits. Read Receipts are bad enough; at least they give you the option. Is this common practice among HTML newsletters these days?

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