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Comment by magnat | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard watermarks screenshots produced by World of Warcraft find and track users of emulated servers by embedding user account info and server IP all across the image.

https://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-...

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Fascinating stuff. I didn't think my trust in software could be broken any more, yet here I am.

I assume you are aware modern games are tracking everything players do. The have heatmaps and everything. It's been going on for quite a while

I am, yes. But this was not the case when I played WoW 15 years ago. I mean, I knew that I was playing on a server, and of course they are tracking everything on a server. But for some reason this steganography in the screenshots just gets under my skin.

With current games I go in with the assumption that I'm in a public place, and act accordingly. But back then I really counted on my Personal Computer being personal, so this feels like a breach of trust.

I'm much less bothered by the idea of developers having access to things like aggregated anonymous heat maps, and more worried by the amount of individual details required to generate such a heat map.

It's not the software. It's the humans that write the code. Someone had to do it.

It would be interesting to know if there are some GDPR ramifications here. Do Blizzard leak private data if I grab a screenshot and share it publicly?

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