Real ID / forum issue cleared up

It feels lately like my reader is choking on all of the outcry related to Blizzards announcement that forum posts would require users’ real names over the past few days, but it seems that Blizzard has listened to its community. Blizzard CEO and cofounder Mike Morhaime turned up on the forums this morning, and this is the opening paragraph of his statement (the complete statement is here):

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

I’ve been bracing myself, wondering what was going to happen with this. Would it go on for weeks? Months? Was Blizzard really completely cutting themselves off from its community on this issue, beholden to whatever Activision’s mandates are with regard to social networking, etc.?

I’ve been following both the news and the community outrage, and I have to say that it is heartening to see Blizzard make the decision that they made, and quickly. Online privacy is a very serious issue, and the arguments against using RealID info on the forums were, to me, overwhelmingly stronger than the arguments for doing so. I have to express my thanks to all of the people who commented on blogs and the official forums, making it known very loudly that this was something disagreeable to many users for very real reasons.

Thanks to ::skurmish:: for posting this info.

Facebook, tentatively

As I told my each of my employees last week that I was leaving my job, some of them commented, “You need to get back on Facebook, so we can keep in touch with you!”

Because, even though we all live in the same area, they’re kids, and I’m supposed to be an adult, so the fraternization-outside-of-work thing is pretty much nil.

I laughed them off, because my discomfort with Facebook and its security issues is well known at my former job.

However, on Monday morning, I found myself reactivating my account. It turns out that, in the time I had been away, I had received several friend requests and messages that I had to sort through, reply to, etc. I also received “gifts” and invitations to play Farmville, Petville, Mafia Wars, and a couple of other casual “games.”

Once the sorting/responding/ignoring was complete, I then had to decide on which info to enter and make public. When I last participated in Facebook, I posted all kinds of info about my interests, along with several dozen pictures. This time, with lingering uncertainty about this type of info being available on something so rife with issues as Facebook, I decided to do things a little differently.

• Picture: Anacrusa
• Info: High school and college info.

Simple. Since I’m not trying to recruit old friends or hot girls to my Friends list, and the info on all of the musicians, books, games, etc. that I’m interested in is superfluous, this information will suffice.

So we’ll see how this goes. I’m still not too keen on the whole thing, but so little info is exposed, and my natural tendency to delete emails (from anyone who isn’t a family member, friend, or a company that I buy stuff from) should keep me relatively safe from most anything that can go wrong.

Ugh, I can’t believe I’ve actually written this much about it already!

Some thoughts on online privacy

Gordon at We Fly Spitfires posted a very good article a couple of weeks ago entitled Online Privacy And Why It’s Important, and it got me thinking about this issue again.

There is all manner of information out there on this subject, and people have many different opinions about it, ranging from ultra-conservative fear to complete lack of interest (or discretion). Any time I read anything about online privacy, I find myself revisiting my feelings about it, which I would generally term cautious.

What comes to my mind most often is Facebook and its myriad privacy/stability issues, and the way that people make use of it to broadcast their lives at whatever level they are comfortable with to whomever they choose, for better or for worse.

There are two parts to that thought: Facebook’s issues and people’s usage. While it is a social-networking phenomenon, Facebook has been the center of several controversies surrounding its privacy policy (and changes to it) and security. My unhappiness with the reality of the format (read: all of the crap in my News Feed) soured me on the whole “reconnect with long-lost friends” premise that initially drew me to Facebook, but security issues were what finally drove me away (see my initial post on this blog). When I initially created my profile, I filled in as much of the information as I felt comfortable with, and had a rather significant Info page. As time went on, I added some photos, linked a few videos, and wrote a couple of blog posts. I mainly used Facebook as a means of reconnecting with old friends from high school or college, and to communicate with some of those people through the email system, which was one of the benefits/draws for me anyway.

My initial enthusiasm for Facebook dwindled when I saw what was happening to my News Feed as I added more friends. It became filled with three kinds of what to me was spam: quiz results, casual game activity updates, and an insanely high amount of status updates. I know that status updates and “tweets” are the way of the world at this point, and I understand the potential value of the status update, but when someone is telling all of his “friends” that he didn’t shower today, I’m not interested. And when someone else is announcing that she is having problems with her husband to all of her “friends,” many of whom happen to be church friends, the level of discretion/tact/forethought is low, in my opinion. Unfortunately, my feed was rife with this type of information, and I hated sifting through it (when I did) to see if there was anything interesting there. It eventually became an unbearable time sink for me.

My enthusiasm sunk to a new low when I added a few of my younger cousins to my list of “friends” at their requests. My feed instantly became inundated with photos of one of them, who had just graduated from college, apparently loves to party, and has no shame about posting drunken pictures of herself on her profile with captions such as “me totally wasted on (fill in holiday/reason to be totally wasted at a party here)” for all of her friends, family and co-workers to see. There are hundreds of these types of photos on her profile, and along with my irritation at being sort of forced to see them came a sense of dismay at the thought that she could be endangering her new consulting job by posting this type of content.

I wonder if there will be some type of fallout from all of this. How much of this over-saturation of public personal information will come back to haunt people in years to come? How many careers and personal relationships will be affected? How much of what you say can and will be used against you?

I’ve considered these questions at times, along with some of Gordon’s other points, as I’ve worked on posts for this blog. I know that I am relatively new to blogging, but I’ve tried to write with some level of maturity and responsibility in my posts. I can’t think of anything that I’ve written that I would regret saying, want to hide from anyone, or that I wouldn’t show my parents. And while the subtitle of the blog is “formless, random, casual,” the blog is not a diary of everything that goes on in my life, but is rather a medium of expression, one that allows me to practice writing and editing, share thoughts, and enjoy the experience.

As a side note, I have found my blogging experience thus far to be very rewarding – it’s a completely different animal than Facebook, and I love the freedom that it gives me. I am writing on a semi-regular basis for the first time in my life, and while I don’t have a high-traffic page, I don’t aim for that. The process is the reward.

I’m finding that I don’t have a good way to wrap up this post. I think that my main point was to share my thoughts on the subject without stuffing a 900 word comment on We Fly Spitfires. My final thoughts are that 1) I love the fact that there is a world of possibilities for creative expression online, and 2) while we have more ways to connect with others than ever, I don’t know if enough people understand the ramifications of what they say on their blogs, comments, and social networking media of choice.

If you haven’t read the article linked above, check it out. It’s worth the read.