Writer and software developer Zed A. Shaw has taken to his blog to declare that Riot Games has violated Californian Employment Law via a recently commissioned study.
Said study, according to Shaw, “mined” in-game chat logs of former employees to determine whether or not current employees should be fired due to similar speech.
“The article says they used an analysis of employee’s game play to decide if they should be fired,” Shaw writes. “This game play was based on behavior the employee did not know would be used to fire them and was collected without the employees’ explicit permission.”
Shaw lists eight key faults with the study, saying that the practice violates California Labor Code 980, which states, “Nothing in this section precludes an employer from requiring or requesting an employee to disclose a username, password, or other method for the purpose of accessing an employer-issued electronic device.”
He concedes there is a grey area present as Riot owns the very system it is mining the data from.
You can read Riot’s study here, and Shaw’s full argument against it here.
Riot Games has a presence here in Australia. They’ve seemingly been looking for a full-time Content Editor since February of last year.
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