Millions of people go online every day to harvest fruit and vegetables, buy seeds and tractors, shear their sheep and milk their cows.
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It’s just another standard day on the virtual farm games offered by social networking sites like Facebook. Other people opt to keep virtual aquariums, work as cooks or pretend to be mobsters.
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But what many players don’t know is that while they’re busy having fun, others are busy collecting personal data about them. Experts have started to warn about the risks of giving up too much information unintentionally.
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Social games are free and don’t need to be installed on a computer, since they can be played via a browser. Since the games rely on communication and interaction between players, social networks are an ideal platform for them.
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Thanks to those networks, the games have spread rapidly in very little time. Industry leader Zynga reports that it alone draws about 230 million players a month to play Mafia Wars, Poker or Farmville.
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The gaming industry sees a lucrative market. A study by the German consulting company of Muecke, Sturm Company found that companies in this industry earn between 680 million and 1.3 billion euros ($872 million and $1.67 billion) a year with social games.
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But how do they earn that money? Microtransactions are the key. Although the games are free, anyone who wants to get a leg up, have a little extra play money or own especially useful goods can do so by paying out some real money.
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Less than 5 percent of the players use this opportunity and the individual sales are small. But, with millions of players, that quickly adds up to a lot, says Jens Begemann, director of Wooga, a social gaming company based in Berlin.
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Data is the second kind of currency in the world of social gaming. As soon as…