World of Warcraft: "Jimmy McAlister"
Posted: Wednesday July 7th, 2010
by
When Woody linked me to the official Blizzard forums talking about implementing Real-ID for their forums, I was instantly against it - and I couldn't tell you why this was my gut feeling. I don't use the Blizzard forums so hypothetically this shouldn't impact me in the least. I know it annoys me on a privacy level - if you spend just a couple of minutes I'm sure you can find all sorts of horror stories of people being tracked down in real life by their pseudonyms on the internet, but again I don't use the Blizzard forums so why does it bother me?
I think what it comes down to is the movement towards these companies "requiring" this type of information... well... it sucks. Coming from a corporate background, I've seen people admonished, demoted and even fired for doing things they assumed were outside of the general workplace - the latest version of this I can think of is the Best Buy tries to iPhone cartoon maker story. The fact is, with all the crap that's publicly available on the internet, it's way too easy to establish a name to an address. Yes, it may be a tiny bit harder for all you "John Smiths" out there, but there are quite a few of us with original or rare names in the world out there.
Example? At one point in the huge Real ID thread on Bliz's site, a GM popped in to say "Hey I think Real ID is a good idea!" and posted his real name on the thread. Within minutes his physical address, email address and phone number were posted in a reply. Thanks to the quick "delete" fingers of the Blizzard mods it was removed almost instantly; but the damage was done. If you read Blizzard's Real ID FAQ, it's obvious that what they're trying to build is a Blizzard version of Facebook - a social networking site for you to talk about Blizzard games, get together with your guild, set up matches, etc, etc, etc... The thing is, Facebook's already screwed up security on more than one occasion - and starting out with a policy of "everything you want to post publicly uses your real name" doesn't really bode well in my mind.
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I think what it comes down to is the movement towards these companies "requiring" this type of information... well... it sucks. Coming from a corporate background, I've seen people admonished, demoted and even fired for doing things they assumed were outside of the general workplace - the latest version of this I can think of is the Best Buy tries to iPhone cartoon maker story. The fact is, with all the crap that's publicly available on the internet, it's way too easy to establish a name to an address. Yes, it may be a tiny bit harder for all you "John Smiths" out there, but there are quite a few of us with original or rare names in the world out there.
Example? At one point in the huge Real ID thread on Bliz's site, a GM popped in to say "Hey I think Real ID is a good idea!" and posted his real name on the thread. Within minutes his physical address, email address and phone number were posted in a reply. Thanks to the quick "delete" fingers of the Blizzard mods it was removed almost instantly; but the damage was done. If you read Blizzard's Real ID FAQ, it's obvious that what they're trying to build is a Blizzard version of Facebook - a social networking site for you to talk about Blizzard games, get together with your guild, set up matches, etc, etc, etc... The thing is, Facebook's already screwed up security on more than one occasion - and starting out with a policy of "everything you want to post publicly uses your real name" doesn't really bode well in my mind.
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