NetEase’s Mobile Game Suspected of Publishing Paper in US Based on User Data

On April 17th, NetEase’s mobile game Dream Chaser: The Showbiz denied a recent report suspecting its role in publishing a paper in the US containing user data.

Dream Chaser: The Showbiz is a mobile game in which players take on the role of celebrities. Players make various expressions according to text prompts and then AI will migrate real-life expressions to game characters in real time, and judge whether players’ deduction is in place with one click. The game was developed by NetEase‘s Fuxi Lab.

That netizens had such suspicion was due to one game programmer involved in the game’s AI programming had won the championship for both detection of facial expressions and facial emotion recognition at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

On April 17th, the company responded that all data sources in the relevant papers published in CVPR in 2021 and 2022 were public data and did not involve gamer data. The paper went on to outline the data sources used in the publication. CVPR is a top conference in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition organized by IEEE.

The game official also said it had strict internal regulations on information and privacy protection that players cared about. The collection and use of user information must be authorized by users in advance and only for specific purposes. With regard to sensitive information such as facial data, the company’s backend computer servers do not store all of the information locally or on the server.

NetEase established its Fuxi Lab in September 2017 in an effort to focus on innovating game experience with AI. On December 4, 2021, NetEase announced the next generation of Internet technology architecture for metaverse in which the virtual character software development kit “Youling” and the immersion activity system “Yaotai” were developed by Fuxi Lab.

SEE ALSO: Chinese Mobile Game Publishers Earned Over $2.22 Billion in March

In addition, Fuxi Lab has also supported the development of many games aside from the controversial Dream Chaser: The Showbiz. Titles include Justice Online/Treacherous Waters, Wangchuan Sichuan Fenghua Record, Meteor Heroes and others.