Since a couple of patches ago, Blizzard implemented a anti-cheat check to their World of Warcraft client, and it works by checking if you are running any third party programs that are considered as cheats or hacks that gives you a advantage in the game over the other players. The way it checks if your using such a program is by every 15 seconds taking a snapshot of every titlebar that's running in the background, this includes the titles of what you currently are browsing, which movie you currently are watching, which text documents you are reading and so on. This is breaking the privacy rules for many countries in the world if the user hasn't agreed upon to let the client to check every 15 seconds. Considering World of Warcraft is the most popular mmorpg out there right now, with well over a couple of million of users world wide that is affected by this, and if this is in fact considered illegal, they could be in very severe trouble.
4.5 million copies of EULA-compliant spyware
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2 comments:
It doesn't break a law when you hit the "I accept" button.
It is sly the way they do it, but it is not illegal. I believe they need to advertise that this is what they are doing.
I'll try to read through all their contract/policy the next time I get the chance, and I actually don't think it's that big of a problem, they could use it to spy at people but I think their service is just used automatically so there's actually no-one that reads what the users actually are looking at.
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