Posts tagged ‘rant’

July 14th, 2010

Thoughts on privacy (or the lack thereof)

Between Zuckerberg’s proclamations, data-mining, mobile tracking, and all the other ways our livesPrivacy. Image by Alan Cleaver are exposed, every day someone is echoing the sentiment that privacy is dead. I agree that the degree to which we’re able to keep information of any sort truly private is eroding; I don’t agree that privacy is dead. What’s dead is our ability to take privacy for granted.

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.

July 10th, 2010

Follow-up to the Blizzard Real ID situation

After a somewhat disastrous few days of PR, Blizzard announced that they would not be requiring real names be used on the forum. As I mentioned in my post earlier this week, I felt the move to real names in the forum was an unwise idea. Blizzard’s decision to listen to their users and use a different approach to address the forum problems was a smart move. It showed that they do, in fact, listen to their users when push comes to shove. While some users feel like Blizzard’s move was merely a hollow victory given some of the other ongoing issues (e.g. EULA complaints), I’m hoping that this is a continuance of their social technologies learning curve.

July 8th, 2010

Why I think Blizzard Got it Wrong

I have a confession. I game and I don’t play just any games. I play World of Warcraft, but I don’t just casually play, I raid. I dedicate a portion of each week to cooperatively kill vicious pixels with 24 other people. I admittedly don’t do the killing. I’m a healer and I am, in fact, our raid’s healing lead. I virtually manage a team of 5 – 6 other people to keep the raid alive. I’m also pretty good at it.

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? read more »

June 8th, 2010

Red Bull gives you wings, right?

I’m going to need some wings since THERE’S NO LONGER A BRIDGE TO OUR WEDDING VENUE. *headdesk*

There is not supposed to be a giant hole in the bridge. Bridge does not equal donut.

Somehow, I don’t think the problem will be solved in less than 11 days.

January 27th, 2010

Early Adopters Anonymous

I’m an early adopter. I’ve been an early adopter since before I was the only girl in my dorm with a computer. I love technology and gadgets and cool geeky toys. I have my iPhone 3G, my PS3, my Roku, and my Kindle. There’s some functional overlap that’s happened over time. My Roku eliminated my cable TV use entirely and now, my PS3 offers the streaming Netflix functionality that drove my Roku purchase. I’ll keep them both because there’s always going to be more than one room in the house and you never know what kind of cool content Roku might offer next.

So, enter the iPad. It’s shiny, right? It’s a giant shiny gadget calling out to me and my insatiable geekery. But y’know what? Not seeing it. If I were a college/grad student and all my text books could go on the thing complete with graphics, maybe. But even then, the inability to multi-task is really capping my enthusiasm at lukewarm. No multi-tasking, no Flash, no HDMI, no widescreen movies, no webcam, no cam at all, and an additional $30/mo bill for me to have access to the web on the fly? No.

I can get on-the-go multimedia on my iPhone, which is also, shockingly, a phone. I’m already paying for it and adding a dataplan for the added functionality makes sense. My Kindle offers me instant gratification but doesn’t make me pay for it. Granted, it’s black and white at the moment, but that covers 99.9% of the books I read. My Kindle, which isn’t the DX, fits in my purse nicely – a not large purse. It is similar in size to a paperback. I’m not going to start carrying a bigger bag just to fit an iPad, which I can only use periodically whilst out and overlaps the functionality of my iPhone which I purchased from you previously. Carrying and paying for both monthly seems silly. And it certainly isn’t like the iPad can replace my MacBook Pro. I can’t very well play WoW on the iPad, can I?

Unless there are some developments between now and release, I won’t be in line and I won’t be buying one in the near future. I’m an Apple fan, don’t get me wrong, but either I’m not the target audience for this particular product (while I am for the vast majority of their products) or they missed the boat a tad on this one. Bummer, that.

Oh also, my wedding dress came in! This is unrelated, but more exciting for me than the tepid iPad news.

November 13th, 2009

Forget the invites! I'm using notebook paper.

Wedding invitations. Engraved, letterpress, thermography, and digital. Every shade of paper under the sun, except the color you actually want. A bazillion colors of ink, but the color you like isn’t available on the paper you want. The invitations are customizable except for the part you don’t particularly like.

And they’re all ridiculously expensive.

*sigh*


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