Gamers propose punishing Blizzard by flooding it with GDPR requests
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In my mind you have to do something when you see blatant injustice, so it is justified. If you say that what I judge as unjust is political, then fair enough, it may very well be.
If you consider this a difference of opinion between the government and you, then yes, it may be political. In my view core values are not political, because you can't argue for and against them.
Refusing to obey that order from your government is a political decision.
Your protest against someone taking a stand against authoritarian rule is itself politics.
Your decision to use one licence over another when using or publishing software is politics.
Everything is politics, because everything that involves more than one person is politics and the decision to do something without other people is politics.
Everyrhing is politics, but politics isn’t everything.
As a business, you absolutely don't have to declare your stand on the political issues in your country, let alone issues in some places half way across the world.
And especially declare your stand when you're not asked.
Hacking culture and politics are deeply entwined. Phreaking, for example, was a way to say no to AT&T monopoly.
I tried to have my account and data deleted but they ask for an ID proof upload in order to proceed... Funnily, I no not want to send them more data about myself in order to have what they already have be deleted. As the formats supported include txt, I uploaded a complaint about this but the ticket is pending.
So I've just used your link. We'll see if that speeds up the process :)
A mass request like is being proposed would just make Blizzard script out a response.
To be clear: a company can arbitrarily break something you paid for by terminating your account, or just taking the servers online, that is completely legal. That company can then sue you if you connect to someone else's servers or bring up your own, because that is illegal copyright infringement or contractual violation (and possibly CFAA violation because idiocy).
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/08/the-88-million-server...
And given that, a lawyer could argue that paying to play on (or even donating to) a private server is contributory copyright infringement. I don't know if that has been tested in court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infring...
But oftentimes you can get away with it; few game companies go after small private servers.
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21955.htm...
Hearthstone itself is free-to-play. The most a player can do is not spend future money.
I'd hate to be the engineer who has to talk to all people and ask them about how they are processing user data, where are they storing logs, what happens to it.... it's the most boring work you can imagine for a programmer.
At the same time it's great that people can learn about these things.
I am biased of course as I work on various aspects of GDPR compliance, data retention and deletion, encryption compliance, etc. I used to think this stuff was really boring compared to high scalability, graphics, schedulers etc. (all of which I have worked on in past lives); lately I think it is both interesting and crucially important hence my comment.
But I doubt that it can be as interesting as working on the game engine where you get visual feedback.
If you look at the software market, there are lots of stories about game programmers being underpayed compared to other programmers even when they have better knowledge about the inner workings of the computer hardware. There is a valid reason for it.
Also if you are using the data to help the user, and it's explained to the user, it is legal. But I'm not a GDPR expert, others here on HN know much more about it.
If the model aggregates the data of multiple people and is disconnected from the individual it does not constitute PII and can be kept.
But yeah there are no quick scripts in corporate software, even though Blizzard claims to use agile development I doubt the effectiveness of it. I remember some small vital features/fixes in world of warcraft would be delayed to next expension because "they already had a road map in place" - agile my ass lol.
That might just be their polite way of saying "lol bugger off, I'm busy".
But what about reading law, understanding if your company is compliant to the law or not, making those compliance changes, and knowing that if you made a mistake the company takes a huge financial responsibility?
My girlfriend was doing these things for her 2 person software company, and she was more scared about making a mistake than having fun.
The second part has some interesting reactions from fans, counter reactions from blizzard. This moment has rocked the gaming community, and generated some memes on the internet.
My point is that we should use GDPR for what it was made for and use other means to put pressure on Blizzard.
People would also have to leave their house and go make an argument in front of a judge... seems unlikely.
In this case modern T&Cs give companies carte blanche to dry service to anyone for any (or no) reason, so you'd have to demonstrate it was a bias against a protected classification - race, gender, maybe age - but even then, US courts have repeatedly stated that the constitution applies only to US citizens.
There is no apolitical position in a situation like this.
That's a huge difference. China is free to make their own rules for when they do business with foreigners. Just like how the US enforces sanctions. Germany is free to business with, say, Iran, but if they do that then the USA is going to not do any business with Germany. So Germany has to decide whether they want to do business with the USA or Iran more. Is that censorship too?
A better theoretical might be if say the US were to force a company to choose between speech supporting a political dissident (maybe Snowden?) and doing business with the US. Not too hard to imagine really, and it would be censorship.
Valid in which sense? And is the logical extension of your position not a complete ban on trade with China?
See the NBA story from today where the NBA refused to censor a player for supporting HK. See why this isn't just about "a gamer"?
We crossed these sorts of lines long ago but it was political speech they disagreed with then, so it's only bad now. If everyone had been more inclined to defend peoples right to views they don't agree with then we wouldn't be here now.
Plenty here were fine with Stallman being fired over his personal views, now they're seeing the other side.
It's a weird argument.
Should you be able to lose your job, be cutoff from a private service, be banned from a project because of your public opinions? It's a yes/no question and modern society appears to be converging on yes. This is a consequence of that decision. An easy to see consequence that many of us warned about but got drowned out of the conversation being called racists, christian fundamentalist, pedophile apologists and everything else when we speak for their rights.
So congratulations to the people that cheered Stallmans firing, various de-platforming techniques, codes of conduct, etc, you've normalized this and given the CCP all the weapons they need to control speech in the west.
What I think instead is that people who were against previous de-platforming (whatever their reason) want to use this situation, which is obviously egregious and cowardly on the part of Blizzard, to muddy the water.
It's hard to prove the innermost opinions, but I do believe that there's a lot of outrage coming, among others, from people who are absolutely fine with deplatforming and consider it a valid tactic but don't consider that player a valid target. There definitely are others who are against deplatforming on principle. They are consistent, but I don't think all are. Of course, anybody can change their mind any time, and if this incident converts the proponents of deplatforming, then the next case will be very different.
De-platforming is a consequence, and the debate is not "is de-platforming OK?" but "when is de-platforming OK?"
For the last decade the left could have been focusing on extending worker protections and putting some hard lines on their personal opinions and what the can be punished for at work. Instead they've made corporations the morality police, and ultimately they only listen to money.
Of course they do, but there is no mention of a boycott in the article.
This is not the only article on this topic, nor the only thread of conversation about this.