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ESRB Exposes Emails of Gamers Who Filed Privacy Complaints
simrook writes, "Many people filed privacy complaints with the ESRB over Blizzard's recent (and afterward recanted) move to require the display of users' real life names on Blizzard's official forums. 961 of those complainants had their email addresses exposed in the ESRB's response." The response itself didn't go into the organization's thoughts on Blizzard's plan, but they explained to the Opposable Thumbs blog that anonymity isn't a huge concern to them, as long as users are given the opportunity to opt out.
"The role of the ESRB Privacy Online program is to make sure that member websites—those that display our seal on their pages — are compliant with an increasingly complex series of privacy protection laws and are offering a secure space for users to interact and do business online. ... But online privacy protection doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as anonymity. It's about making sure that websites collecting personal information from users are doing so not only in accordance with federal regulations but also with best practices for protecting individuals' personal information online."
Removing the cloak of anonymity from users, (no gaming pun intended) opens up a can of worms like S. Korea has with violence spilling over from inside the games to the streets. Posting people's information only sets up circumstances for some very bad scenarios to play out. The PvP server forums are often full of haters hating full tilt on each other. When is someone unstable going to get pushed too far and end up on someone's doorstep? When some horrible situation plays out on the evening news, BlizTard will end up sued down to foodstamps in a trailer park for liabilities. Not to mention once a politician with an ax to grind will take a look at the clime of these kinds of game and start preaching on a tall soap box how they are so very evil for our kids and basically anyone to be wasting their lives in. About the time someone in the media checks out any trade channel in the game on a Saturday night, they will flip out, and so will their religious buddies. Stuff like this sells.
This is a formula for some crazy people to do something crazy, then the government to step in and take a big bite out of the game industry cash.
Take the Red Pill.
first of all, when you cancel on the website, they ask for a reason and be sure many many people put 'i don't want my name in the context of a computer game on the internet'
second - people not only cancelled their current wow subscriptions but also preorders for Starcraft 2 and WoW: Cataclysm released this year (SC2 in 2 weeks). PR disaster would simply kill sales. Suddenly the pile of money involved is bigger and profits from deal with facebook would not be enough to cover the easily measured losses.
and from personal experience from regular reading the official forums - you can be damn sure that what customers want is a secondary issue for Activision Blizzard now. Pretty much all concerns fall on deaf ears and only a massive outcry (that WoW thread grew 15 posts/min for 2 days straight) with flood of cancelled subscriptions/preorders plus media outlets describing the problem, adding to PR damage can do anything meaningful. Only non-issues or already answered questions get any official replies that have any substance in them and Blizzard changing the already set course is unheard of.
SC2 community gets no LAN and crappier, less useful, regionalized, tailored for nickel-and-diming XBoxLive imitation. Be sure nothing of value was said by Blizzard to explain why exactly Battle.net 2.0 is shit when compared to a decade old Battle.net classic.
Quite recent quote from a high rank guy showing that Blizzard got drunk with all that money from WoW and now they know what their customers want better than the customers themselves:
- Do you really want chat rooms?
(duh, you think why that interviewer asked you a question about this? maybe because community wanted them and expressed that desire in countless threads?)