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.