King’s Award-Winning ‘Privacy Saga’ Makes Terms of Service Playful
The iconic mobile designer’s approach to making its privacy policy more accessible has earned two awards for innovation and introduced a new creative standard for compliance
When most people think fun, they don’t think ‘privacy policies’. The dutiful progeny of legal and IT teams, privacy policies can all too often use stiff language and tiny fonts to explain how personal data is collected and used on digital platforms. But at King, where even the fine print is fair game to be fun, the lawyers decided to shake things up a bit.
“Most people know they should probably read privacy notices but are often put off by the experience and the legal jargon that makes it difficult to understand,” says Willy Duhen, senior legal director and data protection officer at King. “Typically, the privacy policy experience is not fun. We thought we could do better, so we went the extra mile.”
King enlisted “human-centric” design firm Amurabi to help rethink its privacy policy as a game map featuring King’s most iconic characters in eye-catching graphics. The map uses simple language to demystify data collection.
The result — Privacy Saga — sees characters like Yeti from Candy Crush Saga and Stella from Bubble Witch Saga escort players through six easy levels of bite-sized explainers on how their information gets used and shared. “There’s no legalese,” says Duhen.
Recently, Privacy Saga won the IAPP Privacy Innovation Awards for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific), as well as Most Innovative Project from W@Privacy, an association that supports and promotes women working in the fields of privacy and data protection. It was also shortlisted for the Best Innovative Privacy Project at the PICCASO Privacy Awards.
Though Privacy Saga supports King’s full privacy policy, its thoughtful wording makes universal privacy best practices understandable to everyone, regardless of age or background.
As data privacy standards evolve, King’s forward-thinking model could lead as an example of how to make compulsory aspects of data privacy laws more engaging.
“We have redefined the player experience with privacy documents and demonstrated to the world how even the unexpected can be playful,” Duhen says.
Take Action
🍭 Play King’s Privacy Saga, which is optimized for mobile and tablet and can be accessed via the King website:https://www.king.com/privacyPolicy.
About the Author
Marli Guzzetta is the Director of Corporate Content at Activision Blizzard. She creates narrative campaigns to champion the world-class, diverse talent behind games like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch 2, World of Warcraft, and more. See some of Marli’s favorite games in bio. 🎮
The privacy saga is misleading.
“ Use your Facebook or Google account. We’ll automatically link your profile with your King profile, so you’ll share your name and your profile picture; and other information that you select to share with us.”. Other information is your friends list. You have no choice but to select to share that.
You will share:
“ Your Facebook friends
If you sign up with Facebook. (Note: you can remove your access to your Facebook friends by changing your app permission settings in Facebook)”
Note that if a user changes the app permission to remove access to the friends list, they can’t keep playing the game without restoring access to the friends list.
I tried to raise this with King legal, they passed me to customer service as they thought it wasn’t a legal issue. To not share my friends list (because friends may not have consented to share their details, I was informed I have to delete my account and create a new account with my email - it is unclear if I’ll lose all my progress (huge time and money cost). There is no option for me to just use Facebook login as an easy access method and not play with my Facebook friends.
Let’s see what the data protection officer says… right now I believe that the idea of this saga is worthy of an award. But I believe they should be stripped of it, because it’s misleading and unclear.
Awww sorry. Maybe they didnt recognize u. what do u think about this anonymous betting with cryptocurrency? Just joined them... - https://tinyurl.com/3fbhv4ts