Blizzard to remove the veil of anonymity

I'd +rep you for this, but I've given out too much rep in the last 24 hours and will need to try again later >.>

http://us.ncsoft.com/en/legal/privacy-policy.html
Yes, the law related clauses are in there, but there's nothing about not only recording all chat
and ingame communications, but /monitoring/ it as well.

I did like these parts though:
"Please do not use your real name or the real name of another person when selecting a user name. Please note that your user name will be available to the Internet's general public while you participate in some services, like chat rooms or message boards, so you should exercise discretion when using these services."

"Don't post your real name on a web site or message board, and never tell anyone online anything private about yourself or your family, including your phone number and address. Use screen names at all times."

"We have established and maintain reasonable security procedures to protect the confidentiality, security and integrity of your personal information. We use encryption, Secure Socket Layers, and other technical measures (such as off-site backup, security testing, and password protection), and we implement off-line efforts to further protect this information, including limiting employee access to personal information and updating our employees regarding our security practices and privacy policies."
Certainly better than sending all that stuff unencrypted, INGAME where common mods (and mods are VERY common in WoW) can display people's real IDs.

Obviously no Internet service is going to have guaranteed privacy in all cases, like law enforcement, but NC's policy is far better than Blizzard's. Even the wording is nicer (which might be construable as insidious by some), making you at least think they care about you, instead of all caps shouting "WE WILL READ AND SAVE EVERYTHING YOU SAY TO GIVE TO ANYONE WE WANT AT ANY TIME ALONG WITH YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION SUCKER!" I love how Bobby Kotick frequently uses with word "Exploit" when referring to how he treats his customers.

Venture is clearly insane though, so I was having trouble including his stuff in the conversation. As for the auction, didn't people have to nominate you last time? I vaguely recall someone else signing me up. I'd do it if I can make the date, and people want me to. Though, after last time, I might have to tack on "No one with foot fetishes can bid on me"

One GM for Blizzard did it... and got harassed to holy heck. Like, bad yo.

Actually, I'm making the stronger statement that I don't think it needs to be proven necessary. We don't sit around trying to logically prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that free speech is necessary. Contrawise, even if you could prove free speech had a statistically negative impact on the death rate in America, that wouldn't be enough to revoke it. Some things we accept as the price for living in a free society.

I dare say that even if you were to discover a totalitarian society on earth where violence against women was five percent what it was in America, you wouldn't be tempted to emulate it. Well, I'm assuming anyway.

The "grotesqueness" of Venture's world to me isn't that he considers the loss of anonymity to have statistically insignificant consequences, but rather that Venture seems to be suggesting that I should base my disclosure decisions on what I can statistically prove. That would be like asking me to base my preference for not being mugged on the street on the ability to prove society isn't better off allowing muggers to attack me rather than potentially be forced to commit other crimes. If I were a Blizzard customer affected by this decision (at the moment, I'm not) and if my personal information was disclosed without my permission (which I cannot say with certainty it would be under this policy) whether I feel violated by that decision has nothing to do with the statistical likelihood of someone misusing that information. That that probability is non-zero is a separate, general fact worthy of social discourse. But it doesn't inform my personal feelings on the matter.

It should really be enough that I decide to keep something private, and someone else decides to violate that decision. In fact, you could argue that in a world where privacy is increasingly becoming a technological impossibility, its really values that have to pick up the slack. Increasingly, our privacy is based less on what we can personally enforce, and more on what others elect to grant to us. From that perspective, someone that decides that privacy is meaningless and those who desire it deluded simply because it can be technologically revoked is actually something of a sociopath.

Will you ever stop talking nonsense?

IRL harassement, persecution, stalking and yes physical assaults of various types have been a consequence of the internet almost from the moment there WAS an internet.

Yes it happens in a small % of cases.
Just like ANY crime of ANY SORT happens in a small % of cases.

Using your bass-akward gibberish thought process we shouldn't bother fighting crime since it doesn't happen that often. Also, everyone should smoke 3 packs a day since it will only give SOME of us emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease.

I'm not sure if you're mental, not very bright or just a sociopath, but whichever the answer is you're profoundly wrong.

Si, I saw your post with the pics of his house and directions to said house(thanks btw)...i want to know if the "pro" name disclosure peeps have changed their forum name here in support? I'm gonna guess no or that they word-craft it so you have to think about what it could be?

Hah, brilliant!

They should take this idea and run with it.

Last night, I was reviewing this thread in my mind, going over everyone's arguments. I discovered something: Very few people are in favor of this. The people that are "Pro" aren't so much "Yeah, this is a great idea! I'll sign up NOW!" They're more "This isn't as bad as everyone says it is."

Heh, thanks.

I suppose this is where I say: "I claim no ownership of that idea and Paragon Studios/NCSoft are free to do with it as they wish without having to ask for my permission." So go nuts, if you want to. I'll just smile and laugh.

One thing is for sure about this RealID thing: I'll never buy another Activision-Blizzard game. Not even Starcraft 2, despite looking forward to it.

By choice. Not enforced.

Even so, simply because people in other venues on other services use real identities, it doesn't mean that it's applicable here.

That you know of.

And you're full of ****.

Do yourself a bit of a favor and do a little research on how stalkers and rapists acquire their victim's profiles. Then come talk to me about your statistics.
Never mind that it was pitifully easy to anonymize pertinent details about your personal identity on Usenet. I only ran for 5 years where the only legitimate thing other Usenet users could get about me was the originating network of the machine I was remoted into.

So tell me again about how much of a panopticon it was. I need a laugh.

Your argument is that, simply because someone has the technical means to compromise your anonymity, so it doesn't exist at all is as childishly simplistic as it is wrong.

My personal data is just that. MY personal data. I choose what, where and with whom I share it. I also place conditions on how those parties may use and disseminate that data. At NO point have (or will) I give consent to make this data generally, publicly available to any Tom, Dick or Jack Emmert who simply browses a community website.

If they violate these requirements, bad things begin to happen to them.

Now Blizzard wasn't going to get any money out of me anyhow. But this pretty much guarantees they never see a cent from me EVER.

If your valuation of your own privacy is less than mine, that's your problem. You'll eventually learn the error of your ways. You better hope the lesson isn't TOO expensive though.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Thats the safe play...since its over there(WoW) and not here(CoX)...however what will they say if or when it ever was implemented here?

WoW's size and sucess is the only reason I'm intrested...they lead the pack and I'm sure other Dev teams are watching.

It's actually sorta worse than that - I'm giving people a chance to reveal or not reveal their gender, which is one more choice than what Real ID provides.

Sure there are boys named Sue out there, but in most cases, revealing first names also reveals your gender... But my remark wasn't at your request, it was at who it was directed to. You already know my answer (and that I don't support the change) but in general I'd like to keep that off the forums.

EDIT: And I just watched last week's new Futurama, parts of it really seem to speak to this discussion...

This is one case where I don't think there's that much risk of people following WoW. What Blizzard is trying to do here is to pull a Facebook. They have access to eleven (is it still eleven?) million people with disposable income and addictive personalities. That information, assuming they can monetize it, is a mint waiting to be tapped.

This is why they don't care about forum outrage - it's ~1% of their user base, and even if half of them quit, it's a drop in the ocean compared to what they hope to gain. This is also why RealID on the forums is just the tip of the spear. They're going to integrate, network and merchandise their users out the ying-yang. It's the coming apocalypse.

(Contrary to popular opinion, Facebook is neither clumsy nor incompetent about your privacy settings. The more of your personal info they can publish, the more valuable you are to them. It's in their vested interest to make privacy settings as difficult and obscure as possible.)

However, the value of the information is increased by the size of the community because of the network of interactions. It's not quite the square of the size, because there's overlap, but it's way beyond linear. So a community like ours, which is perhaps 1% the size of WoW, isn't worth the risk, monetarily speaking, to exploit like this.

Now NCSoft might try to do something across all their brands. That could be a threat. But my sense is that their portfolio of games isn't tightly integrated enough to pull it off.

which is what will kill them in the end.
they're creating the market for their eventual successor, the same way Myspace created the market for FB after Murdoch took over and 'monetized' everything.

Sex crimes are in the violent crime index.
It's the only area where women victims Do officially exceed men.

Also, another place that confuses the statistics:


Many crimes are reported by the government based on on when they're reported. Others are reported when there's a conviction- oftentimes after a plea bargain reduces the offense. How these affect the middle ground can really mess the numbers up

A good example comes from the violent crime of "assault." Pretty straightforward. Let's take the classic barfight- two guys duking it out, tuning into 10 guys... event too confusing to decide who may have had a legal right to self defense. They're all booked on a "violent crime" offence, but offered a "disorderly conduct" plea bargain, which they take. Where do they appear on the index?

How about your typical first-time domestic abuse call? Often, the victim, if she doesn't rescind her testimony outright, requests some form of plea deal to 'save the marriage:' if the attacker successfully completes anger management courses, the charges are reduced... usually to disorderly conduct ( recorded as a nonviolent offense).

In these ways, the numbers only tell part of the story.

I would lay money on the answer to that being "none."

I would lay a lot of money on there not being a single woman involved in the decision-making process on this at Activision/Blizzard.

Agreed.

I would not take that bet.

There's a definite blindspot at work in Blizzard's thought process. Their upper-level development team is all male, in contrast to their competitors in the gaming industy and the MMO genre. And given Blizzard's lack of past experience with MMORPGs, to say nothing of Activision's, it's worthwhile to ask if it really is part of the MMO community.

It depends on your definition of involvement. I get the feeling this is all coming down for a /very/ select few people at the top. Others have discussed it for sure with them, but I don't think they had any real decision making sway, much like the 2000+ pages of people saying no also holds no sway to that same select few people.

EDIT: Left a tiny word out that made things not make much sense grammatically >.> Fix't

even if i were not a cheapskate, id not bet against that. and it is sad that i wouldnt really.