by Zancarius » Tue Jul 06, 2010 10:08 pm
While I agree there are privacy issues involved, the simplest solution is to just not post on the WoW forums. Their content isn't very meaningful anymore. I read through much of that thread when Trekk had linked it to me, and most of the responses are, well, nothing short of a knee-jerk reaction. I stopped posting on our realm forums well over a year ago simply because it's not worthwhile. I suspect that's part of Blizzard's motivation for trying to create a system where players have their identity exposed (by the way, you can change your real name from inside your Battle.net preferences, so if you want to post as George Bush, by all means go for it). Given the backlash, I don't think this will persist, and I suspect they're going to wind up providing players an option of selecting a unique nickname across all forums. It'll get resolved one way or the other, so don't get too worked up over it.
But again, the best solution? If you don't like it, don't post. You're not missing out. Trust me.
I would also like to add that I disagree somewhat about identity theft. It's much more than a name, and as of 2 years ago, well over 50% of all identity theft reported to the FBI was conducted offline via low tech means. Specifically, people who would throw out mail sent to them with private information and forgetting to destroy or shred it later discovered that their ID was stolen. It's the same for credit cards--you're more likely to have it stolen by someone you've purchased an item for locally than you are to have it stolen via a high-tech attack on specific vendors or banks*. Online ID theft is much more difficult to conduct, and anyone who disagrees needs to consider that virtually all phone books in the US are exposed to the Internet in a searchable, indexable format. If your real name were such a dangerous thing to expose, then someone could simply write an application that trawls phone books for names, searches details on the names, and then comes up with a method of pairing names to other data. You wouldn't even need to have your ID exposed via a game. You'd simply need only a landline.
An additional point to consider--and this goes both ways, for and against--is that a Counter Strike gamer was brutally stabbed by a fellow gamer whom he had killed in-game with a knife. I believe this occurred in France. The point being: Neither of these guys knew each other's real names until the perpetrator went out of his way to search for his victim's name and where he lived. While hiding your real name from fellow gamers minimizes this risk, the basic point is that obfuscation is unlikely to disguise anything from someone who is determined. In that respect, the best course of action is to own a gun. Security experts will tell you: Obfuscation should not be mistaken for true security.
I won't be posting a response because it's mostly a non-issue for me, and there are far too many "me too"-style posts in that thread as it is (>700 pages at the moment or ~7000-8000 posts). The quality of Blizzard's forums have long since degraded into a cesspool of childish antics, so forcing real names upon anyone who opts-in to post there doesn't really bother me. I don't have a Facebook account for the same reason: It's not terribly interesting to me.
* That's not to say this doesn't happen, but it's important to remember that whenever banks are compromised, online credit card theft is an all-or-nothing endeavor: Either you get millions of cards or you get zero. Most of these exposures were the result of oversights or other lapses in security more than they were some elaborate break-in. It's important to remember that there is a huge gap between reality and Hollywood when it comes to "hacking."
I gave that lich a phylactery shard. Liches love phylactery shards.
