Nintendo Neuters Sharing Features on 3DS - The UpStream

Nintendo Neuters Sharing Features on 3DS

posted Saturday Nov 2, 2013 by Scott Ertz

Nintendo Neuters Sharing Features on 3DS

Mama Nintendo has announced this week that her children have disappointed her and shall be punished. In this instance, she has discovered that some of her children, particularly the minors, have been using their devices for naughty purposes, so she has taken away that capability.

Nintendo has learned that some consumers, including minors, have been exchanging their friend codes on Internet bulletin boards and then using Swapnote (known as Nintendo Letter Box in other regions) to exchange offensive material. Nintendo has been investigating ways of preventing this and determined it is best to stop the SpotPass feature of Swapnote because it allows direct exchange of photos and was actively misused.

The feature at hand is Swapnote's capability to share photos between friends over the Internet. As anyone who has ever worked in the technology world will tell you, the first thing that happens when you give people a camera and direct connection is pornography. You can make it request only, as Nintendo has, but people will find a way around that as well.

In my exploration of the Windows Phone Store, I discovered a promoted application called Kik, which is a messaging service, seemingly for people who don't pay their cell phone bills. The service, however, has been coopted by children trying to talk dirty. You can prove this theory by reading the reviews of the app, which are all kids sharing their usernames and posting whether or not they will talk dirty.

Obviously, the company tried to keep it secluded to only people you know, but there is always a way around that; in this case sharing in reviews. For Nintendo, the process was slightly different, via forums, but with the same result. The difference here is, Kik doesn't particularly care what people use the service for, as they are protected from litigation based on what their users do with the service.

Nintendo, on the other hand, is known for their maternal instinct. Features that have been commonplace for Microsoft and Sony were delayed with Nintendo as they tried to figure out how to implement them without safely. For instance, online play came to the Nintendo world several generations later than it should have, all because of Nintendo's parental decision-making process.

Overall, this is not really a loss for the handset - it's not like the ability to share photos was the reason people owned a 3DS; that's what they have a phone for. It does, however, emphasize the odd difference between Nintendo and the other rest of the industry. For better or worse, it is who they are and they are proud of it.

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