Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal is bad for privacy rights | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal is bad for privacy rights

msnbc.com

25 pointsRickJWagner17 comments

Reminds me of Blizzard asking me to send them a photo of my ID in order to delete a Battle.net account. Which is a ridiculous hurdle and it makes no sense since they don't have anything to check my ID against. I ended up stripping all the information, changing the email to a temporary one and abandoning the account.

I'm in EU, I was able to completely delete my entire battle.net account two weeks ago, (active since 2005) just by going to the support page and filling some web form. No ID photo required. Once you send that, you get an email confirmation and unless you cancel the request, your account will be permanently deleted in a few days.

The account removal page didn't even work few months ago. I was getting some generic error messages and eventually gave up as it didn't seem to be temporary. Asking for more data when I clearly want the exact opposite is funny.

It's more bloody consolidation; it's bad for all kinds of things. What we need is the exact opposite of this.

Why would you tell your Call of Duty any private data whatsoever?

If you play it at all, you're telling it when you play games.

Of course the server I play games on knows when I play - just as the website I visit will always know I visited it. Who cares though, and if one cares, why do they play online games?

Anyways, I'm also pretty sure Microsoft gets pinged nearly every time one opens an application (unless a power user disables it), so they already know either way - what's the new risk?

Who cares about cigarettes being dangerous? People already smoking knows that.

What's the new risk?

Toyota's new 'more we know about you' program randomly extends their warranty for 2 years (or +50k miles) for new car buyers who have Crash Bandicoot game time in their dataset. Also Walmart will give $30 back on purchases >$125 if you have played at least five hours X-Men Legends in the last week while they're promoting the new Wolverine movie.

It's not all good though ... people who play Call of Duty are more likely to default on their loans and World of Warcraft is well known to have a strong correlation with sexual predators. Banks and FBI buy the relatively cheap video game data and use it to decide which individual's browsing history ($$$) and pc usage telemetry ($$$) to buy from Microsoft.

The article provides no detail on new privacy risk, yet it is the title of the piece… is there some new vector? I agree with your sentiment that it’s not like Microsoft just gained access to some entirely new portfolio of information about you, they already have access to the superset of this data since they own Xbox (PlayStation provides a million data points on the amount of time, progress, and trophies I earn in games that are not owned by Sony - i assume the same for Xbox?)

Fine if you want to postulate as to what these privacy risks are but wtf, the article provides no detail whatsoever here lol.

Anti-Cheat tools can be used to collect data. Blizzard uses one called Warden.

https://worldofwarcraft.fandom.com/et/wiki/Warden_(software)

If those things don't seem like issues to you, there are no problems. Then again, if you don't care about privacy at all it is a little strange to engage with an article that is about privacy.

When you play. What you play. How long you play. With whom you play. What you say to anyone and what you say at what times. How good you are at what times. And so on.

That all adds nicely to a big data pile about you, they have from other sources.

Don't play online games then. There is plenty of offline gaming available.

My point is, Microsoft most likely already knows, and even if they didn't, isn't it a given that they know when and for how long do I play their own online games?

"Don't play online games then."

On a general basis, why? Not every company is assumed to track and sell everything you do.

But when you play with windows as a base ... yes, then it probably does not matter anyway.

Even the simplest Minecraft server installation tracks the players.

And as for companies, for example in EU there is a law that says any online service must collect usage logs and store them at least few years, I guess it's the same in the US.

Any server you're connecting to and playing on will know when and for how long, and your individual actions will be logged at the very least at the network level.

If you don't like it, your only choice is to not play online.

Even that is becoming a limited choice thanks to DRM; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always-on_DRM

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