Privacy Paranoia

Big shitstorm about Blizzard's announcement that real names will be tagged, without recourse (opt-out = don't use the official forums, ever) to forum posts... for games like Starcraft 2, WoW, etc.

Scary. Not sure I even want to play Starcraft 2 now. Time to make a whole set of fake names just for Blizzard.

I bet they will have an emergency meeting and recant. It's too big for them not to.

Keen (of keenandgraev.com fame) was the first guy who clued me in while I was browsing my RSS feeds at work. He didn't get it. Folks argued with him. He posted his real name as a challenge. Two folks posted his address and he started getting a bit spooked, but made an excuse that it was just a careless registrar regarding his domain, and that he had quickly gotten them to take it down.

I decided he still didn't get it. Some Googling later, grinning at an (updated 7 hours ago) registrar website, and finding out that Google still had his address and all in their cache, I sent him a nice long comment post with his real name, birthdate, age, address and phone number. His LinkedIn site with the college he was studying at, and the degree he was taking, his two emails, favored nicknames, his Steam profile, and his photobucket account (which to his credit, contained only game pics).

He had been smart enough to at least lock comments for moderation.

Sometime after, he locked comments for good, with an update that smacked faintly of whining that the folks most concerned about privacy were the meanies who were digging up all his information in the first place.

*wry grin* I probably wasn't the only one whose comments contained all that info.

Bashiok, some WoW mod who was trying to defend the post over on the WoW forums and posted his real name, exposed himself to an even bigger crapstorm. I didn't do anything, I don't know him and I can't be arsed.

But a ton of other WoW-forum-reading fanatics did. Besides the standard data profile of name, address and Facebook-related sites, they've got incriminating pics of him (looking like prime employee-avoidance material having dressed up as some kind of goth Viking), info about his family - he apparently still lives with his mom, tried calling his home number via Skype, etc.

Massively has caught on to the news, there are 150 comments, most of which rehash the same arguments, with a couple dumb folk posting their real names and other folk indulging in some casual Google datamining on them. I considered posting, then decided I rather not make myself a target there, period.

It's interesting to see how people who claim they "have nothing to hide" and diss privacy advocates suddenly backtrack when they realize they do have information (which isn't criminal in nature at all) they'd rather not have broadcast to the general public... including all the internet fuckwads out there.

There are always layers of information that we are comfortable revealing about ourselves, to varying groups of people.

Hell, someone determined enough and lucky enough could walk their way through my feeble attempts at placing some obstacles up and fly over here to nail me dead.

The point is not to make it easier for any random guy to do a couple Google searches and link your game life to your rl, though. That's just fucking scarier than scary.