Big Brother Blizzard Is Watching You
The editors at Kotaku recently revealed some disturbing news to fans and obsessed players of the MMORPG World of Warcraft: the big brothers over at Blizzard Entertainment are watching you.
Blizzard’s “warden client”, a spyware program that runs scans of your system every 15 seconds. Here’s what someone found out that handy bit of coding could do. It was able to read the window title text for any programming on your computer, not just WoW related, grab the email addresses of MSN contacts, check out open URLs, various other not-so-nice things. Blizzard says it’s all about the security. Perhaps so, but I don’t particularly like the idea of them snooping around on my system.
Blizzard has responded to these allegations on its forums, stating that the scans are legally speaking not an invasion of privacy, but that they could not discuss exactly what it did do for fear that the hackers would find ways to circumvent it. Apparently these scans are for our own good, helping to keep the WoW servers free from cheaters who would ruin it for all of the honest players out there. When a player is found to be hacking, Blizzard has the ability to suspend the account. The wording of the Blizzard reply is extremely important, as they say that:
Note that we have absolutely no need for any personal information from the player’s machine to take that action. That is, we can completely do our job and shut down a cheater’s account without gathering any personal data from his or her computer. Again, we have no use or desire for any personally identifying information that a player may have on his or her computer, and this particular security measure we have in place for World of Warcraft does not look at any such information on a player’s computer.
Not that they don’t have access to the player’s personal information, nor that they couldn’t look at it, but rather we’re supposed to believe that the grand benevolent Blizzard has no desire for such things, and thus leaves them untouched. Pardon me if I’m a little unsure about that.
This isn’t the first time that the company has been spotlighted for scanning players either. In 1998, it was taken to court for using StarCraft to look through player’s hard drives and emails.
2 opinions for Big Brother Blizzard Is Watching You
the play girlz gaming blog » Hiding from Blizzard
Nov 4, 2005 at 8:14 am
[...] For those of you worried about what Big Brother Blizzard might have access to on your computer, salvation is underway. Thanks to some World of Warcraft hackers, you can now hide from the Blizzard-installed spyware. All you need to do is a Sony BMG protected CD: “Load a store-bought CD with Sony’s DRM on it, and then use its cloaking capabilities to hide your WoW app.” World of Warcraft hackers have confirmed that the hiding capabilities of Sony BMG’s content protection software can make tools made for cheating in the online world impossible to detect. The software–deemed a “rootkit” by many security experts–is shipped with tens of thousands of the record company’s music titles. [...]
Tor
Nov 21, 2005 at 11:05 am
Oh come on now *smiles* what do you have that you’re so scared that blizzard will find out? Blizzard is your friend, you *must* love blizzard, they are the only gods. Because if you don’tthey’llblockyouraccountandsendyoutojaaaaai- *gets dragged away*
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