This post refers to the recent blizz announcement:
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=25626109041
Just a quick summary if you don't want to read the whole thing (it's not that long). Basically, for billing information you provide blizzard with your name and address, this information is now being instituted as what is known as a realid. Realid will be familiar with those in the Starcraft 2 beta. If you had an IRL or otherwise trustworthy friend, you could give them your realid and in game your actual name would appear in messages, notifications, etc. and not your online alias.
This was kind of a cool feature, not that I gave blizzard my real name at all (and I live on 123 fakestreet). However, soon blizzard is going to implement mandatory realid usage in their forums. This is INSANE. What this means is that whenever you post on the blizzard forums (I believe only WoW and SC2 will be affected) you have to use your real name, first and last.
as a bit of an aside, I'll let you in on a secret that I never really PLAN out blog posts. All of them are written from scratch in one go whenever I feel like it. I mention this because I have a TON of things to say about this. Normally, I can get in my head the general flow of the argument - but this time I really can't so I do apologize if this post is very jumbled, but I'll try my best to edit afterward.
WHERE I'M COMING FROM
Now, let's get a bit ethical so you can see where I'm coming from. I firmly believe that your information is yours. If you give it to a company I think it's wrong for them to just give it away - with few exceptions a company does not NEED to store your personal information. Government agencies are exempt from this but I think as they need to maintain birth records and citizenship information this really isn't an issue with most people. The bottom line here is that your information is yours.
REASONS WHY THIS IS BAD
1) Some people have unique names
As someone who has a unique name I'll admit my bias on this topic, but surely others can see the concern? When you can literally just google a name and find information about that person as their name is unique how in the fuck does Blizzard think slapping their name all over the forums is a good idea? What if thier name is in a public registry. WOOPS, now someone has their address and phone number. If someone finds and attacks another player via the WoW forums Blizzard had BETTER face a class action lawsuit for careless distribution of information.
I'll admit my knowledge of security/privacy is limited to one CS course I took, but even people uneducated in the field should notice the giant red flags with this. A solution could be to k-anonymize names. Keeping things layman, this means names which are uncommon become truncated. For example, if your name was Dan Xeeflux or something absurd like that, it would be truncated to something like Dan X. The amount of truncation refers to how many matches Dan X brings up. For example, Dan Xeeflu would bring up just as many as his full name, same with say Dan Xeefl. Eventually, you want to have over k matches, where k is a variable to determine the truncation amount.
HOW exactly Blizzard would accomplish this is beyond me, but it's not my ass in hot water when someone gets physically confronted in real life.
2) This could cost you a potential job
This post is slightly more speculation but hear me out, I think it's a good point. Employers are now using the internet to check out potential employees before they commit to a hire. You can google this if you really don't believe me but I've worked at a company that checked facebook for their applicant's names to see if they could dig up some not so nice habits like pictures of them using drugs or what have you and weigh it in their decision to even put them on the interview list. To be fair, we never found anything.
However, now when someone googles your name, maybe they'll run into your WoW account. Hell, maybe they'll google your name + WoW. WoW has a growing reputation as a massive time sink and for destroying lives, etc. You've heard all this before, and IMO it's no worse than any other MMO - but the stigma for WoW players is out there. If a company wants you to be work focused, they may feel WoW is a liability to your productivity and job dedication. If they believe you'll stay up till 4am raiding every night and show up to work haggard these are not points in your favor.
Again, having a more specific name hurts here, however what if your interviewer doesn't want to take any chances? Say you have a common name, they search it and find it on the WoW forums and figure "hell, let's not take any chances, that could be this candidate!" and just take you off the interview list? This is perhaps stretching plausibility, but i feel it's well in the realm of possibility.
3) This could affect your CURRENT job
This was something I hadn't even considered until I just read a few pages of comments on the topic. What if someone finds out you play WoW, but you're in a position of authority? My main concern is being a teacher or the like and having your students find out you play WoW. They could then find you in game and potentially harass you. Furthermore, it may lessen the air of authority a teacher should (imo at least) generally carry. If your students see you as a buddy buddy WoW player this may compromise your authority. Maybe they'll feel superior to you since they're higher level or have better gear? Do they not have a right to keep their online and real lives separate?
4) This game is about escapism and you're bringing it to real life
This sort of ties in with the last point, why is it so wrong for people to want to keep their online and real lives separate? The IDEA of WoW is to create an Avatar and be someone you aren't. To grow them and make friends in an online and safe environment. Blizzard is removing this and the two worlds are going to collide together in an ugly way.
5) This is illegal under Candian Law
Being Canadian I'm pretty familiar with our privacy laws. This seems to be in direct violation with Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Now I'm no lawyer, but one of the main ideas with PIPEDA is that "The law requires organizations to supply an individual with a product or a service even if they refuse consent for the collection, use or disclosure of your personal information unless that information is essential to the transaction"
Is disclosing my personal information essential to the service? No, it's not. Blizzard must then, at least for Canadians, give us the option of non disclosure. If they do not, I hope they see class action lawsuits.
6) Under certain situations this is illegal under US law as well.
What if someone is under witness protection? It is illegal for Blizzard to disclose ANY information about the name or whereabouts of this person in any fashion. This is probably a fairly rare situation, but with 11 million players could a few of them be under witness protection? A quick romp in the blizzard forums and I was actually very quickly rewarded by the first damn post in this thread:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25712374700&sid=1&pageNo=1
Never say it can't happen!
WHY THIS IS HAPPENING
I think this is really the kicker of the whole argument. ALL of this, all the risk, the shady dealings, the potential ILLEGAL nature of this whole damn thing is done for one reason, or at least under the guise of "combating forum trolls and stopping flame wars".
Oh yeah guys, this is a just cause here. Fuck your privacy rights, fuck your LAWS - our moderators are too lazy to clean up the forums themselves and we can't have people get hurt feelings on the internet - we'd rather players track them down in real life and MURDER THEM.
That's probably a bit extreme, but there is literally no REASON to do this. Now I hear you argue "the forums are OPTIONAL, they aren't required to play the game". Fair point. However, what if my game breaks or I run into bugs? Blizzard's job is to provide me with technical support, and to do that guess where I have to go? The forums. To do that I need to disclose my name.
I can also hear people argue that the threat of having your name out there is probably exaggerated. However, you can't deny that it doesn't at least INCREASE risk where risk need not be increased? Blizzard, I assume accounts are currently linked to in game characters, if you start putting IN GAME punishments, like block WoW access for 24 hours for forum infringements, I think people would get the message.
I can also hear people argue, and I would disagree, that there simply IS no risk at all in putting your name out there. Besides being utter bullshit, your logic also points to Blizzard's use of real names being pointless:
If there were no risk at all in having your real name on their forums, then how in the hell would that stop trolling and flaming? If people weren't scared of real world repercussions then the flaming and trolling won't stop. On the flipside, if Blizzard is adamant that it WILL reduce flaming and trolling they are flat out admitting that they're putting you at a direct security and privacy risk as that's the only reason I can think of someone would stop trolling and flaming.
NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF THIS. If anyone at Blizzard is reading, I beseech you STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING!
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=25626109041
Just a quick summary if you don't want to read the whole thing (it's not that long). Basically, for billing information you provide blizzard with your name and address, this information is now being instituted as what is known as a realid. Realid will be familiar with those in the Starcraft 2 beta. If you had an IRL or otherwise trustworthy friend, you could give them your realid and in game your actual name would appear in messages, notifications, etc. and not your online alias.
This was kind of a cool feature, not that I gave blizzard my real name at all (and I live on 123 fakestreet). However, soon blizzard is going to implement mandatory realid usage in their forums. This is INSANE. What this means is that whenever you post on the blizzard forums (I believe only WoW and SC2 will be affected) you have to use your real name, first and last.
as a bit of an aside, I'll let you in on a secret that I never really PLAN out blog posts. All of them are written from scratch in one go whenever I feel like it. I mention this because I have a TON of things to say about this. Normally, I can get in my head the general flow of the argument - but this time I really can't so I do apologize if this post is very jumbled, but I'll try my best to edit afterward.
WHERE I'M COMING FROM
Now, let's get a bit ethical so you can see where I'm coming from. I firmly believe that your information is yours. If you give it to a company I think it's wrong for them to just give it away - with few exceptions a company does not NEED to store your personal information. Government agencies are exempt from this but I think as they need to maintain birth records and citizenship information this really isn't an issue with most people. The bottom line here is that your information is yours.
REASONS WHY THIS IS BAD
1) Some people have unique names
As someone who has a unique name I'll admit my bias on this topic, but surely others can see the concern? When you can literally just google a name and find information about that person as their name is unique how in the fuck does Blizzard think slapping their name all over the forums is a good idea? What if thier name is in a public registry. WOOPS, now someone has their address and phone number. If someone finds and attacks another player via the WoW forums Blizzard had BETTER face a class action lawsuit for careless distribution of information.
I'll admit my knowledge of security/privacy is limited to one CS course I took, but even people uneducated in the field should notice the giant red flags with this. A solution could be to k-anonymize names. Keeping things layman, this means names which are uncommon become truncated. For example, if your name was Dan Xeeflux or something absurd like that, it would be truncated to something like Dan X. The amount of truncation refers to how many matches Dan X brings up. For example, Dan Xeeflu would bring up just as many as his full name, same with say Dan Xeefl. Eventually, you want to have over k matches, where k is a variable to determine the truncation amount.
HOW exactly Blizzard would accomplish this is beyond me, but it's not my ass in hot water when someone gets physically confronted in real life.
2) This could cost you a potential job
This post is slightly more speculation but hear me out, I think it's a good point. Employers are now using the internet to check out potential employees before they commit to a hire. You can google this if you really don't believe me but I've worked at a company that checked facebook for their applicant's names to see if they could dig up some not so nice habits like pictures of them using drugs or what have you and weigh it in their decision to even put them on the interview list. To be fair, we never found anything.
However, now when someone googles your name, maybe they'll run into your WoW account. Hell, maybe they'll google your name + WoW. WoW has a growing reputation as a massive time sink and for destroying lives, etc. You've heard all this before, and IMO it's no worse than any other MMO - but the stigma for WoW players is out there. If a company wants you to be work focused, they may feel WoW is a liability to your productivity and job dedication. If they believe you'll stay up till 4am raiding every night and show up to work haggard these are not points in your favor.
Again, having a more specific name hurts here, however what if your interviewer doesn't want to take any chances? Say you have a common name, they search it and find it on the WoW forums and figure "hell, let's not take any chances, that could be this candidate!" and just take you off the interview list? This is perhaps stretching plausibility, but i feel it's well in the realm of possibility.
3) This could affect your CURRENT job
This was something I hadn't even considered until I just read a few pages of comments on the topic. What if someone finds out you play WoW, but you're in a position of authority? My main concern is being a teacher or the like and having your students find out you play WoW. They could then find you in game and potentially harass you. Furthermore, it may lessen the air of authority a teacher should (imo at least) generally carry. If your students see you as a buddy buddy WoW player this may compromise your authority. Maybe they'll feel superior to you since they're higher level or have better gear? Do they not have a right to keep their online and real lives separate?
4) This game is about escapism and you're bringing it to real life
This sort of ties in with the last point, why is it so wrong for people to want to keep their online and real lives separate? The IDEA of WoW is to create an Avatar and be someone you aren't. To grow them and make friends in an online and safe environment. Blizzard is removing this and the two worlds are going to collide together in an ugly way.
5) This is illegal under Candian Law
Being Canadian I'm pretty familiar with our privacy laws. This seems to be in direct violation with Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Now I'm no lawyer, but one of the main ideas with PIPEDA is that "The law requires organizations to supply an individual with a product or a service even if they refuse consent for the collection, use or disclosure of your personal information unless that information is essential to the transaction"
Is disclosing my personal information essential to the service? No, it's not. Blizzard must then, at least for Canadians, give us the option of non disclosure. If they do not, I hope they see class action lawsuits.
6) Under certain situations this is illegal under US law as well.
What if someone is under witness protection? It is illegal for Blizzard to disclose ANY information about the name or whereabouts of this person in any fashion. This is probably a fairly rare situation, but with 11 million players could a few of them be under witness protection? A quick romp in the blizzard forums and I was actually very quickly rewarded by the first damn post in this thread:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25712374700&sid=1&pageNo=1
Never say it can't happen!
WHY THIS IS HAPPENING
I think this is really the kicker of the whole argument. ALL of this, all the risk, the shady dealings, the potential ILLEGAL nature of this whole damn thing is done for one reason, or at least under the guise of "combating forum trolls and stopping flame wars".
Oh yeah guys, this is a just cause here. Fuck your privacy rights, fuck your LAWS - our moderators are too lazy to clean up the forums themselves and we can't have people get hurt feelings on the internet - we'd rather players track them down in real life and MURDER THEM.
That's probably a bit extreme, but there is literally no REASON to do this. Now I hear you argue "the forums are OPTIONAL, they aren't required to play the game". Fair point. However, what if my game breaks or I run into bugs? Blizzard's job is to provide me with technical support, and to do that guess where I have to go? The forums. To do that I need to disclose my name.
I can also hear people argue that the threat of having your name out there is probably exaggerated. However, you can't deny that it doesn't at least INCREASE risk where risk need not be increased? Blizzard, I assume accounts are currently linked to in game characters, if you start putting IN GAME punishments, like block WoW access for 24 hours for forum infringements, I think people would get the message.
I can also hear people argue, and I would disagree, that there simply IS no risk at all in putting your name out there. Besides being utter bullshit, your logic also points to Blizzard's use of real names being pointless:
If there were no risk at all in having your real name on their forums, then how in the hell would that stop trolling and flaming? If people weren't scared of real world repercussions then the flaming and trolling won't stop. On the flipside, if Blizzard is adamant that it WILL reduce flaming and trolling they are flat out admitting that they're putting you at a direct security and privacy risk as that's the only reason I can think of someone would stop trolling and flaming.
NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF THIS. If anyone at Blizzard is reading, I beseech you STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING!
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