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Gamers propose punishing Blizzard by flooding it with GDPR requests
- Porthos9K 7y agoAbout time gamers did something useful.
- cookie_monsta 7y agoLike protest against a fellow gamer being denied access to a gaming platform? Given your premise it's hard to see the logic.
- ktln2 7y ago*protest against a fellow gamer being denied access to a gaming platform because of censorship from an authoritarian government.
- oh_sigh 7y agoThe gamer didn't get censored by the Chinese government. A private company banned him because they decided they would rather do business with China than not do business with China. That's a huge difference. China is free to make their own rules for when they do business with foreigners. Just like how the US enforces sanctions. Germany is free to business with, say, Iran, but if they do that then the USA is going to not do any business with Germany. So Germany has to decide whether they want to do business with the USA or Iran more. Is that censorship too?
- ggggtez 7y agoBlizzard is partially owned by TenCent. So actually it is the Chinese government.
- bcrosby95 7y agoOnly 5% though.
- foota 7y agoI wouldn't say it's censorship per se, since in that case the US isn't trying to suppress the speech of Germany, though it is similar. It also involves two countries whereas in this case we're talking between a company and a country. I think the power balance is different between the two. Particularly with a relatively large economy like Germany. Embargoing Germany would affect the US materially, whereas ceasing business with a company will not affect a country unless it is extremely large and strategically important. A better theoretical might be if say the US were to force a company to choose between speech supporting a political dissident (maybe Snowden?) and doing business with the US. Not too hard to imagine really, and it would be censorship.
- meowface 7y agoYes, it's censorship. It's just censorship-by-proxy rather than censorship originating from their own personal stance. The Chinese government may be the root cause, but everyone involved is still complicit in the censorship, even of they're slightly less to blame. No one is forcing them to work with China, regardless of their economic best interests. (Stockholders demanding they make the most revenue possible isn't a valid defense.)
- cookie_monsta 7y ago> Stockholders demanding they make the most revenue possible isn't a valid defense Valid in which sense? And is the logical extension of your position not a complete ban on trade with China?
- cookie_monsta 7y ago*because of the platform's fears of the economic repercussions of displeasing an authoritarian government
- ggggtez 7y agoHe essentially lost his job for political speech. See the NBA story from today where the NBA refused to censor a player for supporting HK. See why this isn't just about "a gamer"?
- flukus 7y agoPolitical speech they agree with. We crossed these sorts of lines long ago but it was political speech they disagreed with then, so it's only bad now. If everyone had been more inclined to defend peoples right to views they don't agree with then we wouldn't be here now. Plenty here were fine with Stallman being fired over his personal views, now they're seeing the other side.
- cookie_monsta 7y agoIs justifying child molestation a political act now?
- etchalon 7y agoYour argument is people should be just as upset by things which don't upset them as they are by things which do upset them. It's a weird argument.
- flukus 7y agoIt's not that they should be just as upset, it's that they don't have any sort of principled stance and are in the cheer squad when the same thing is happening to the other side. They cheer people losing jobs because they disagree with them and get upset that the same thing happens to people they agree with, at least at the group level. Should you be able to lose your job, be cutoff from a private service, be banned from a project because of your public opinions? It's a yes/no question and modern society appears to be converging on yes. This is a consequence of that decision. An easy to see consequence that many of us warned about but got drowned out of the conversation being called racists, christian fundamentalist, pedophile apologists and everything else when we speak for their rights. So congratulations to the people that cheered Stallmans firing, various de-platforming techniques, codes of conduct, etc, you've normalized this and given the CCP all the weapons they need to control speech in the west.
- mlnj 7y agoThe protest is not just for denying access to a fellow gamer, but the company's stance supporting an authoritarian government suppressing human rights and censoring free information. People have a right to boycott an organization when their money is used for something like this.
- SamReidHughes 7y agoDid they support an authoritarian government, or do they simply prohibit their tournaments from being used for activism?
- cookie_monsta 7y ago> People have a right to boycott an organization when their money is used for something like this. Of course they do, but there is no mention of a boycott in the article.
- mcphage 7y ago> Of course they do, but there is no mention of a boycott in the article. This is not the only article on this topic, nor the only thread of conversation about this.
- edoceo 7y agoWhat about a flood of small claims court? In USA it may be more effective?
- duxup 7y agoClaims for what? People would also have to leave their house and go make an argument in front of a judge... seems unlikely.
- olliej 7y agowhat crime or contract violation have they committed? My (NAL) understanding is you can't sue/take-to-small-claims a service or company because of what they did to someone else. Only victims of malfeasance can go to court - even class actions need a number of people who are directly effected to start the lawsuit, before subsequently extending the small scale case to a class action. In this case modern T&Cs give companies carte blanche to dry service to anyone for any (or no) reason, so you'd have to demonstrate it was a bias against a protected classification - race, gender, maybe age - but even then, US courts have repeatedly stated that the constitution applies only to US citizens.
- balls187 7y agoSmall claims is for actual money being owed.
- sangnoir 7y agoThat sounds like the text-book definition of frivolous litigation.
- pkaye 7y agoWhy don't people just end their subscriptions? A financial hit will get their attention.
- olliej 7y agoThe problem is all recent blizzard games require a net connection, so it's not terminating your subscription, but rather stop playing games that you have already paid for.
- Razengan 7y agoI think there are still pirate servers out there.
- olliej 7y agoBut that would be illegal - I was initially thinking of this as a joke in the replay, but then I realized under US law at least this would be a crime. To be clear: a company can arbitrarily break something you paid for by terminating your account, or just taking the servers online, that is completely legal. That company can then sue you if you connect to someone else's servers or bring up your own, because that is illegal copyright infringement or contractual violation (and possibly CFAA violation because idiocy).
- zygimantasdev 7y agoIf you paid for the game client(wow) it is not illegal to play in private servers
- leereeves 7y agoIn the US, it is illegal (copyright infringement) to run a private server. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/08/the-88-million-server-private-wow-server-op-loses-big/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/08/the-88-million-server... And given that, a lawyer could argue that paying to play on (or even donating to) a private server is contributory copyright infringement. I don't know if that has been tested in court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infringement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infring... But oftentimes you can get away with it; few game companies go after small private servers.
- mdorazio 7y agoI doubt this would actually work as intended, but it's fun to see novel approaches to weaponizing the legal system against large corporations like this.
- viraptor 7y agoIf they're actually flooded with requests, someone will likely create a quick set of scripts once and they'll handle it semi automatically soon. Blizzard is a software company, they know how to do that. I'm not sure it will impact them in any significant way.
- tjpnz 7y agoMaybe, but probably not without somehow leaking the relevant personal information first.
- xiphias2 7y agoIt's never a quick script for a big company. I'd hate to be the engineer who has to talk to all people and ask them about how they are processing user data, where are they storing logs, what happens to it.... it's the most boring work you can imagine for a programmer. At the same time it's great that people can learn about these things.
- Symbiote 7y agoThose conversations and boring meeting should already have taken place.
- rrdharan 7y agoI don’t actually think that work is boring at all. Moreover I think it behooves us all to change the prevailing attitude and perception of this type of work; it can be quite technically complex and it is very impactful both to the business as well as more importantly on the moral/ethical front. I am biased of course as I work on various aspects of GDPR compliance, data retention and deletion, encryption compliance, etc. I used to think this stuff was really boring compared to high scalability, graphics, schedulers etc. (all of which I have worked on in past lives); lately I think it is both interesting and crucially important hence my comment.
- xiphias2 7y agoIt is important and complex and hard work, I never questend that. I questioned the ,,just a quick script'' part actually. But I doubt that it can be as interesting as working on the game engine where you get visual feedback. If you look at the software market, there are lots of stories about game programmers being underpayed compared to other programmers even when they have better knowledge about the inner workings of the computer hardware. There is a valid reason for it.
- duxup 7y agoI really think cancelling accounts would be more effective. A mass request like is being proposed would just make Blizzard script out a response.
- nixpulvis 7y agoI'm canceling my account! I'm a long time Blizz fan, and ex-WoW player, who still pays for my account for some sentimental reason.
- Skunkleton 7y agoI just resubscribed for classic. Cancelled this morning.
- dvdgsng 7y agoYou need to upload your ID to cancel the account or to revoke permissions to process personal data based on GDPR. Upload Winnie-the-Pooh instead.
- 14 7y agoI am curious since people are saying that Blizzard will just write a script to deal with all the requests, I was wondering is there a list of European names with addresses and emails and such that the request they are sending is asking for? If such a list did exist then could not someone script something to automatically swamp Blizzard, or any company for that matter?
- tjpnz 7y agoI see that BlizzCon's coming up. Like last year I'm sure there'll be ample opportunity to give the company a bloody nose.
- philipov 7y agoLet's see if people remember that long, or if this is just flash in the pan.
- taejavu 7y agoWhat happened last year?
- tjpnz 7y agoEveryone was expecting a Diablo 4 announcement but they demoed a crappy Diablo mobile game instead. The audience took them to task over it and Activision stock took a hit.
- cpv 7y agoHere's a short video with some summary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkHAlhCvWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkHAlhCvWg The second part has some interesting reactions from fans, counter reactions from blizzard. This moment has rocked the gaming community, and generated some memes on the internet.
- dudus 7y agoI'm all for protesting this against blizzard. Stop playing their games, stop watching it on Twitch or YouTube, organize protests outside their offices and at blizzcon. But abusing GDPR seems like the wrong way to go about it, should cause virtually no impact to them financially or publicly and can only create arguments to limit GDPR protections
- aaron695 7y agoNothing is more cute than abusing the legal system set up to help people to hurt someone you don't like, woot. They should have done this during gamergate as well boingboing!
- mikorym 7y agoI would also suggest cancelling your account, even if you intend on reopening it later. These kind of events are short lived; you need a seemingly strong drive of people who want to cancel their accounts, even it is only for short while. Maximum impact is what the CEO and management can see now and en masse.
- yoaviram 7y agoHere's an easy way to send a GDPR erasure request: https://opt-out.eu/?company=activision.com https://opt-out.eu/?company=activision.com
- mikorym 7y agoCan you do this even if you are not an EU resident?
- LocalH 7y agoEven if such requests are ultimately discarded, it would slightly increase the burden they have to process such requests.
- sheepdestroyer 7y agoThank you very much. I tried to have my account and data deleted but they ask for an ID proof upload in order to proceed... Funnily, I no not want to send them more data about myself in order to have what they already have be deleted. As the formats supported include txt, I uploaded a complaint about this but the ticket is pending. So I've just used your link. We'll see if that speeds up the process :)
- Kiro 7y agoI don't like that GDPR is being abused like this. It will only hurt GDPR and likely not hurt the intended target at all and if it works it will encourage more abuse which will lead to GDPR being softened. My point is that we should use GDPR for what it was made for and use other means to put pressure on Blizzard.
- pdyck 7y agoI have a Hearthstone package on NPM which gets a few downloads everyday (also from China). Yesterday I removed everything in it and now module.exports is „光復香港 時代革命“ instead of Hearthstone data. https://github.com/pdyck/hearthstone-db https://github.com/pdyck/hearthstone-db
- edejong 7y agoPerhaps you want to rebase your changes to the root of your Git repo (in other words, remove history). Now people can just check out the HEAD^ commit.
- hkai 7y agoI don't like using GitHub for politics.
- wickedsickeune 7y agoHow is this politics. This is a stand against a tyrant, this has nothing to do with political opinions. As a human being you have an obligation to stand against tyrants, nothing political about that.
- mwyah 7y agoI'd argue that this is completely and absolutely political. Just deciding that this guy is a tyrant is political.
- Isinlor 7y agoNot doing anything is also political. Everything is political in social context.
- wickedsickeune 7y agoMaybe you are right. In my mind you have to do something when you see blatant injustice, so it is justified. If you say that what I judge as unjust is political, then fair enough, it may very well be.
- Haga 7y agoA company is at its heart a small authoritarian state, so shouldn't wonder on whose side itim is.
- hkai 7y agoA modest proposal: what if companies advocated neither for left wing nor for right wing politics? They could, for example, produce a product instead.
- luckylion 7y agoThe argument against that is usually that not choosing this side means choosing the other side. There is no place fir neutral ground in the reality of those who's identity relies on ideology, it's "for us or against us".
- danaris 7y agoNeutrality always favors the tyrant. There is no apolitical position in a situation like this.
- La1n 7y agoNot even "the tyrant", it always favors the status quo. I do agree that there is no apolitical position here, I would even argue that everything we do, or not do, is political to some level.