Facebook has repeatedly committed the cardinal sin of showing what comes across as callous disregard for their userbase. Loyal users are a sensitive, fickle bunch. Above all things, they don’t like change or the feeling their patronage and loyalty are being taken for granted.

Between significant improvements to the user interface, repeated changes to privacy settings, and ongoing shifts in how advertising was treated, Facebook has riled the core userbase mostly without apology. Instead of providing a safe, secure, predictable internet home away from home, Facebook has given its users innovation and improvements. For newer users, the changes have been fantastic. Let’s face it. Facebook’s old UI was horrible. Good business decisions? Probably, but for user relations, you’re better off slowly boiling the water.

For users with more longevity, it’s the same as trying to swap out a child’s security blanket. For those users, it becomes all the more frustrating because they’re essentially trapped. They can’t go anywhere else even though they’re unhappy and now, they don’t trust Facebook as far as they could throw the server farm.

Facebook isn’t the first site to face unhappy users and it won’t be the last. Time will tell if Facebook’s choices to make changes despite their users will be a wise or foolish decision. For now, they have some brand repairing to do. In the meantime, they’ll have to be content with “popular, but disliked” and hope no one invents a better mousetrap in the interim.

Privacy has moved from being a passive, expected state of things to the active, ongoing maintenance and protection of personal information where the onus falls on each individual. Facebook’s constantly fluctuating privacy settings are a fine example. Protecting any information you may deem personal requires repeatedly interacting with the site’s ever-changing “new and improved” settings. At this point, information privacy on Facebook can be maintained only through vigilance.

Blizzard’s recent experience with Real ID reinforced that anonymity we may take for granted can end at any time. We’re left with a choice. We can take the time to pay attention to the activities of companies with whom we share personal information or we can just go along for the inevitable ride. The companies we trust today may, in an effort to “be social,” either inadvertently or intentionally expose information we prefer kept out of the public eye. Those changes can occur at any time with or without full disclosure. It’s a risk we take on a daily basis and one we should contemplate every time we choose to register with a site.

With each new interaction, we risk our identities, interests, relationships, and any other information we’ve chosen to share being exposed to the world-at-large. In reality, while we should think twice before we share information, we often don’t. At some point, we’ve all registered somewhere we probably shouldn’t have or shared information that, on second thought, we wish we hadn’t. We can’t take those decisions back. Once the information is out there, we no longer have control of it. It no longer belongs to us as much as we may wish to make it so.

The bottom line is that you need to share information wisely and if you have reason to be concerned about what might pop up, remember that online reputation management isn’t just for corporations. Change privacy settings, delete accounts, request information be removed, and do whatever else you need to do to maintain the reputation you want online. The days of thoughtlessly and anonymously bounding across the internet are long since gone, if they ever existed at all. If you don’t want someone to know what you’re doing, don’t do it – whether you’re online or offline.

People who know me well already know that I play. It inevitably comes up since it’s actually how I met my husband. “Hi, my name is Tammy and I met my husband in an MMORPG.” I started playing a few years ago and I enjoy it immensely. I find it rewarding, in the virtual and accomplishment sense, and I’ve obviously formed some solid and lasting relationships through the experience.

Gaming and World of Warcraft (WoW) in particular have a bad rap with a lot of folks. The games and the people are stereotyped and misunderstood to the point that some employers may decide to not hire someone based on the simple fact that the individual plays WoW. I’ve generally been cautious about how and when I discuss my hobby as the misinformation is rampant (until today, I suppose, but this is my blog so I’m allowed some leeway).

So during the day, I’m a mild mannered employee of a health insurance company who specializes in all things social and internet-y. At night, I’m an extremely tall, lavender goat from space. Don’t judge me. Most of the time, I spend my days educating people about and evangelizing social tools, including the privacy implications. I am deeply invested in my work and I’m a firm believer that social technologies will continue to change how we live our lives. Given that I spent seven years of my life getting a doctorate in Clinical Psychology, it’s fair to assume that I pay attention to such things. It’s also safe to assume that since I work in healthcare and with social media, I am very sensitive to how personal information is managed.

I am extremely protective of my personal information. I am one of the relatively small percentage of people who took full advantage of Facebook’s privacy features. I care about who sees my information and how they see it. I want to have as much control over my information as possible. Only within the past year have I begun using my full name online as it is part of my professional identity.

A month ago, Blizzard (the WoW folks) introduced Real ID. The system allows players to communicate across all of Blizzard’s gaming universes by implementing a single “real” user ID for each player. The system was presented as opt-in and was seemingly designed to connect the users’s real life identities similar to Facebook. The move streamlined player communications and allowed friendships to expand beyond a single game.

This week, Blizzard announced their intention to implement Real ID in the World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo forums. Soon, commenters will be able to post only using their full first and last names as part of the Real ID system. Blizzard stated the change was being made to combat forum trolling and flamewars, which have been a recognized problem.

What happened next may have been a surprise to Blizzard, or perhaps not, but it was not a surprise to anyone familiar with social technologies, Facebook, or with any interest in online privacy issues. Players were outraged. While few argued with the legitimacy of Blizzard’s concerns about trolling, the proposed solution was onerous enough to result in 2000+ pages of player responses in the North American WoW forums alone, over 44,000 mostly angry or simply astounded comments.

While Blizzard points out that the exposure is opt-in, it is only a choice in the sense that a player may choose to post or not post in the forums. While forum posters are merely a subset of Blizzard’s users, they are a vocal, invested, and passionate subset. They are exactly the players that Blizzard cannot to afford to lose or alienate. The mystery here is that Blizzard did exactly that. So, the question is why would Blizzard take that risk or did they simply get it completely wrong?

Within the gaming community, Blizzard is quite similar to another company we know and love/hate. I’m speaking, of course, about Facebook whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently argued that privacy is no longer a social norm. Both companies are 800 pound gorillas in their space. They have a lot of power and often, they are not afraid to use it. I’ll come back to that idea a little later.

Facebook’s recent poor choices with regard to user privacy are all the more arrogant given that the company is used to managing user’s personal, private information. Blizzard, in its defense, is used to dealing with online personas. The only personal information the company has been managing is buried deep within billing and account management and has never seen the light of day, until now.

It could be argued that Blizzard simply made a rookie mistake by assuming that personal information can be dealt with unilaterally. All personal information is created equal and no one’s information is any more personal than anyone else’s. Lending to this argument is the ill-advised move to post the full name of one of the customer service reps, Micah Whipple. You can only imagine the ridiculousness that ensued. Predictably, users began harassing the wrong Micah Whipple via real life means. Mr. Whipple’s phone number, address, mother’s name, and other information were plastered all over the internet. It was an excellent example of how not to post personal information online.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Blizzard made a rookie mistake. While they aren’t exactly giants in the social media and networking space, they aren’t exactly dummies either. They read the news and their employees use the same tools that we do. Their blind spot, of course, may be that those employees work within the gaming industry and are less likely to wish their gaming to remain private. While they were thinking about how the change would impact trolling and harassment on the forum, they weren’t thinking about what occurs in the outside world because it isn’t part of their business, or rather it wasn’t a part of their business until now.*

Unlike other social sites and companies, Blizzard hasn’t been faced with case after case of online harassment turned into real life-threatening issues. Online personas and game universes insulate players enough to avoid some of the hassle that other companies have battled. Harassment, racism, and sexism in game are ongoing issues that Blizzard is serious about addressing but ultimately, players have been able to control information which may have caused the incidence to increase. As a woman, I can choose to identify myself as such or choose not to do so. I can decide if I want to deal with the nearly inevitable consequences of commentary about my gender and competence. I can also block and report players who choose to behave in that fashion. In real life, you don’t get those options.

One of the appeals of the World of Warcraft universe has always been that everyone is placed on what is essentially a level playing field. There is no gender, no ethnicity, no culture clashes, no handicap, no income, no social status, and no age, except what you choose to bring into the game yourself. Status is based on your ability to play. You control your personal information and your identity. No one else. It is the proverbial clean slate. Real ID shatters that. It brings the real world crashing into Azeroth. Just as Blizzard talks about how Cataclysm will render the old Warcraft world unrecognizable, Real ID could very well have the same impact.

For some players there are very real, very serious reasons why they may not wish to have their full names revealed – domestic violence and personal safety due to occupation just to name a few. Obviously, by choosing to not post on the forum, I can continue to control that information, but that is now a part of the full WoW experience to which I no longer have access because protecting my information is ultimately more important to me than a game.

I don’t think this is a rookie mistake where Blizzard failed to anticipate negative reactions to the change. I think Blizzard took a page from Facebook’s play book and banked on its gorilla status and the games’ popularity. I also think that Blizzard calculated the cost-benefit ratio of losing forum posters vs. the increasingly time-consuming efforts to moderate its game forums. In the end, Blizzard stands to gain by fewer forum posts.

From Blizzard’s perspective, they made a change that technically didn’t impact gameplay, didn’t impact the majority of their player base, and therefore, was a smart, calculated risk. Did they anticipate the uproar, canceled accounts, and the negative PR? No. They anticipated a vocal minority; they didn’t anticipate an explosion. In that sense, it is indeed a rookie mistake. It’s a mistake that Facebook, LiveJournal, and a long list of other social companies know all too well. Blizzard failed to consider that perhaps a guild’s leader or recruiting officer might not wish to have the entire world know who they are and that some of the most ardent, invested, and outspoken players and proponents may actually be protective of their true identities. Blizzard assumed that everyone would be okay being unveiled, when, in fact, that is part of the reason why many people play. Blizzard was only thinking about the forum and to them, the forum is real life; they weren’t thinking about the very non-real life universe they’ve helped create.

Will they actually implement the change? That remains to be seen. Blizzard does have a history of listening to its userbase and with this kind of outpouring, they may indeed be thinking about other ways in which they can achieve the desired result. Blizzard has made no secret about their plans to implement increasingly social features throughout their games, as well as to integrate with existing social tools like Twitter and Facebook. Let’s hope that Blizzard does heed their userbase and choose to more cautiously implement features that respect their users’ ability to fully enjoy gameplay, as well as wisely control their personal information.

.

*It is worth noting that Blizzard staff routinely refuse to identify their WoW character names to avoid harassment in-game (a quite reasonable choice, if you ask me). What’s amazing is that their customer service staff were naive (or arrogant) enough to think that players wouldn’t try (or would be unable) to contact them out of game. If Anonymous and 4Chan have taught us anything, it’s that a bit of elbow grease and an internet connection make anything possible, including rigging the Time Top 100 and quite possibly sending Justin Bieber to North Korea. But I digress…