RealID to come to the Official Blizzard Forums

Well you could see this coming. Battlenet, charity pet, celestial mount, remote AH, real ID, recent announcement they will shift towards micro payments and now this deal with Massive Inc. Me and a few others kinda warned for this (were will it end) 2 months ago. Better and smarter profiling, sold to you as a unique experience.

7 years ago I did a 6 months IT project with the biggest (back then at least) home shopping concern in the world. I was stunned when I saw a quick demonstration of how they pull info out of their customer database. Which basically decides for you what you gonna find cool and what you will buy. It's beyond imagination how far it goes. With todays technology and connected with many social networks it's only getting more insane.

When i was there (as a free lance contractor) I had the ability to check every persons credit record i.e. the same info banks can check. I could see if you were blacklisted or not, for what and how much longer. Every employee with a brain could do this. Which made me do a little experiment: over the next 2 weeks i wrote down every persons name that i met who could come in contact with private info (one has a job in a bank, another one works for the goverment, one for a telecom operator, another one is a tax officer, etc etc). It made me realize that basically anyone with bad intentions could collect all info about me available just by using his/her social network.

I don't believe this is gonna become reality. The user base will voice his opinion, many privacy activists (dunno proper english word), etc ... are going to protest. This is just one bridge too far. I still have faith in common sense and the power of a community when it gets serious.

On a funny note, the role players really gonna like this change.

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Originally Posted by Firstcow

Agreed. If Blizzard forces in any way my name to show up anywhere in a public place without me knowingly giving consent I will not only cancel all my accounts but I will file a lawsuit against Blizzard to remove my name from all their servers and also ask for a large pile of cash too.

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I tend to agree, displaying my personal info is NOT cool, unfortunately many of us blindly accept the terms of service each time it is updated and may have already given concent.

I love the doubletalk:

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...Later on, of course, we have lots of things we are talking about with Facebook. We haven't announced anything specific, but we have lots of ideas about ways to cross-populate and share data between the two services.
...We are going to be very clear and upfront with the user...

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So... they don't know everything they intend to do, but they are being all upfront about it. Okay, that makes plenty of sense. More likely they don't want to share if before they have to or they risk losing some new signups and monthly fees. Plus, I wonder how many people are thinking twice about their SC2 preorder. I know I am.

- Souca -

I am most displeased with this. I don't post much on the boards, but I do on occasion. Usually it's to help someone in the UI and Mods forum because the rest of the boards are a cesspool. Now I'm not going to touch them with a 10 foot poll, because it's supposed to be MY choice on who knows my real name.

I dropped my maiden name in google. The FIRST hit I got was to a background check website. Without paying a cent, I saw :

My full name, my age, the towns in which I have lived, people I have lived WITH and my entire immediate family, all with links off to providing the same information on them.

That is not information I want every spedster in the world to have. Not to mention it completely obliterates like half the security questions out there for places like your email or banks. I've seen security questions like "Mother's Maiden Name" "Street you used to live on" "First Phone Number".

My married name is pretty much off the grid and I'd like to keep it that way.

Khatovar, have I told you I love your sig? Shame your married, or we could have had little Annalists together.

- Souca -

http://www.cad-comic.com/comics/c0a129271278475206.jpg

Nice muffin.

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/174/trollface.png

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Originally Posted by EaTCarbS

Nice muffin.

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Thank you. I just baked it.

Oh... you meant... Sorry, nvm.

- Souca -

This thread is by no means meant to steal people away from the other thread in this forum by MuffinMan. But after quickly sifting through those pages I didn't notice that what I'm about to post was already in there. For the fact that people have said what they wanted to say in the other thread they might not see this and I believe this is a big failure on Blizzard's part.

I was linked this [only worried about the initial post]:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....16898792&sid=1

Which suggests we Google "RealID Gameriot" which lead me to this:
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Am...nction?gr_i_ni

And ends here [where it all began]:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...=1&pageNo=1#16

Now the original EU forum post mentions about people finding felonies and such but the Gameriot post does not mention this. I didn't bother to read anything on that 26 page thread on the US forums except for Bashiok's blue posts so I can't tell you whether people did or did not actually post that information publicly about Bashiok. Apparently Bashiok did end up deleting his own Facebook page. I can only imagine what the population of the Blizzard gaming community and other places [like 4chan :)] are going to be doing to people.

EDIT: Threads have been merged, this post kept intact.