Quote Originally Posted by Fay007 View Post
Not to mention such gamefilescan going over the actual FF XIV Folder would be violating in quite some countries and laws
From a legal point of view, the game launcher has to do this to ensure the game is up to date, so no. What would be a privacy violation would be damaging the machine, or sending data from the user's machine without their consent, and you've already consented to to this by agreeing to the ToS. Just because you break the ToS doesn't mean it doesn't still apply. Let me point to an example of a serious screwup, look up PSO2's horrible screwup that bricked machines. One has to ask what the patcher did to brick a machine.

Websites can't arbitrarily send files from your PC to other sites, but when you agree to use FB, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, etc, you also agree to not hold them liable for any information they harvest from your activities due to their tracking beacons. This site (forum.square-enix.com) has the google analytics beacon on it, so if you use any google services, you're being tracked.

Anyone going "it's only pixels", or somehow can't see the problem. The problem is harassment. The game also provides a solution for this called "report harassment". That might ultimately do nothing to the player, but if that player decides to do some kind of revenge-porn by posting it somewhere outside the game to harass the player, then the problem goes outside the realm of what SE has control over and into DMCA's. At that point SE is still legally the copyright owner of the assets, of which I think SE has better things to do than try to shut down mod sites.

SE likely won't do anything until players start giving themselves cash shop items via mods. So please don't poke the bear. If people are modding, don't admit to it, don't discuss where to find mods, and don't post screenshots in public spaces of modded game clients.