SE Please start caring about your players privacy.

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Originally Posted by VanillaWafer

Hm. That's worrisome to have the other thread get deleted, but I understand why and will move on.

Just some questions to ask the devs, in the tiny, tiny chance they read this:

I don't see anywhere in their policies and terms of service that our character data is protected. Why? Should they not be? I get that we all agreed that we don't "own" our characters, but in the wake of recent events, we gotta question if anyone, with the right tools and/or methods, should be entitled to our character's whereabouts and what retainers we have?

Why allow anyone in your blacklist be able to join a instance party with you? Like, there might be a good reason why that person was put there in the first place, and it puts us in a awkward situation of "just play nice and don't talk to each other," like we're in grade school, just so the system can move the queue along.

I get that the blacklisted player should be entitled to not have their gameplay impeded, but there are other players out there in the queue and the party finder exists if said queue is too slow.

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Also, while I'm also on the boat of "hey, this doesn't affect me," please have some empathy for those who are going through it. You never know if and when that shoe is on the other foot and suddenly you gotta deal with it, too.

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This would be unrealistic to implement since it'd affect frontlines and DF. Yes, sounds great on paper, I can't imagine an implementation. The game would have to check everyone's blacklists and make sure they're not matched with each other...

Can you really match 72 players blacklists for FL? Or 8 player DF? Queues are already long as is especially if you're a dps. If you're really in this kind of situation where the once in a blue moon chance that you might queue up and get someone you blacklisted in your party, then you should actually look into queueing with friends or setting a PF where you know people you blacklisted cannot join.

At some point you gotta make a compromise, I am willing to make a compromise that at some point someone I blacklisted might end up in my party and I have the option to either 1. Leave 2. Stay. Of course in an ideal world, what you suggest would happen, but it very likely won't.

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Originally Posted by Rueby

This would be unrealistic to implement since it'd affect frontlines and DF. Yes, sounds great on paper, I can't imagine an implementation. The game would have to check everyone's blacklists and make sure they're not matched with each other...

Can you really match 72 players blacklists for FL? Or 8 player DF? Queues are already long as is especially if you're a dps. If you're really in this kind of situation where the once in a blue moon chance that you might queue up and get someone you blacklisted in your party, then you should actually look into queueing with friends or setting a PF where you know people you blacklisted cannot join.

At some point you gotta make a compromise, I am willing to make a compromise that at some point someone I blacklisted might end up in my party and I have the option to either 1. Leave 2. Stay. Of course in an ideal world, what you suggest would happen, but it very likely won't.

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Well, Yoshi P already answered this in the past, apparently. So my question would be redundant.

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Now, onto the blacklist: I’ve received requests to make the blacklist have more influence on controlling player matching, but if we go overboard, it will greatly affect the speed of matchmaking in queues. Since players are unable to visibly see what’s going on in the matching processes, it may be hard to understand, but say we apply player blacklists to the matchmaking process—the matching speed will be significantly slowed if the player has many people on their blacklist.

Players may say “please implement it anyway,” or “you should make it so that you can toggle the option on or off,” but with the matching system, the simpler the processes, the faster the processing speed becomes. If we put in different conditions per player, or add any extra decision steps, it will certainly lower the process efficiency. I would love to do something about it, but it would be appreciated if you could understand that this is a much larger undertaking than it may look at face value.

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Source: https://www.mmorpg.com/interviews/in...-14-2000121913

Well no idea if it really applies to this, but I was curious what the EU says about this:

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Taking into account the state of the art, the cost of implementation and the nature, scope, context and purposes of processing as well as the risks of varying likelihood and severity for rights and freedoms of natural persons posed by the processing, the controller shall, both at the time of the determination of the means for processing and at the time of the processing itself, implement appropriate technical and organisational measures, such as pseudonymisation, which are designed to implement data-protection principles, such as data minimisation, in an effective manner and to integrate the necessary safeguards into the processing in order to meet the requirements of this Regulation and protect the rights of data subjects.

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https://gdpr-info.eu/art-25-gdpr/

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National authorities can or must assess fines for specific data protection violations in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation. The fines are applied in addition to or instead of further remedies or corrective powers, such as the order to end a violation, an instruction to adjust the data processing to comply with the GDPR, as well as the power to impose a temporary or definitive limitation including a ban on data processing.

[...]

But even the catalogue of less severe violations in Art. 83(4) GDPR sets forth fines of up to 10 million euros, or, in the case of an undertaking, up to 2% of its entire global turnover of the preceding fiscal year, whichever is higher.

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https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-penalties/

I am not sure if the GDPR applies but given that they send over an immutable ID to the clients, which could be counted as personal identifiable information, it's not entirely impossible. If it does then this will be another big problem that Square will have to deal with.
Overall I wouldn't be surprised if XIV will now lose more players due to this issue, especially those who were already stalked in this game. Tbh I am already baffled that they send over this ID in the first place. Wasn't the blacklist saved server-side anyways? Why not handle that stuff on the server then? You can't see blacklisted characters anyways, so why send the data at all? It's a very...questionable...design decision in this case and should've never been approved in this state at all as this might turn into a legal liability for Square, given that they send over such data.
I also do not understand as to why the other topic was silently removed, as this is a security issue. And yes, security issue, because stalkers in this game go to extreme lengths that it does not count as only a privacy issue. We've seen it already with all the doxxing and stuff as to what lengths some people go to. Also with the public coverage already it doesn't look too good to do silently remove topics as it looks like trying to silence valid concerns regarding this.

I hope SE takes measures to hide the account ID; on the other side, their modus operandi in previous situations makes this hope an ephemeral one.

P.S. Also, deleting threads doesn't resolve the problem.

This is the first case I've seen where not breaking the TOS can bring grief down on you. In the past everything was a case of "Risk getting banned" or "Risk PC", "Hurt Performance" etc... all things that you inflict upon yourself.
The implementation of blacklist is like "Ok, doing nothing is not just a case of annoying but bad".

Re other thread getting banned there was a lot of name dropping of existing against TOS things so probably best to keep vague to keep a thread alive.

Going to keep my eye on both this thread and the JP one to see what happens.

Update regarding “the thing”: over 70% of all active characters are now cataloged in the public database, including all of their characters, retainers, travel history, and customization history. This far exceeds the information made via the Lodestone. I’m not sure why Square Enix wants this information about every player to be made public, but if they say nothing, they might as well be endorsing it.

We all know that Square Enix is a struggling company, but it’s sad that they can’t do the bare minimum anymore. Is a bankruptcy near?

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Originally Posted by VanillaWafer

Well, Yoshi P already answered this in the past, apparently. So my question would be redundant.

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I didn't know he did, I guess it makes sense....

I'd imagine people who would be heavily impacted are those who blacklist many or for some reason are blacklisted by many, outliers as they may be...I'm all for blacklist however much/little as you want, the choice is yours.

If someone blacklisted me, in an ideal world, I also don't want to play/talk/interact/see them either. I also understand why this might be hard/unrealistic to want/desire in a MMO setting with alot of the focus is on instanced content because that's almost all there is. If the game leaned heavily into open world type content, for example let's say GW2, I think it won't be an issue...?

That's my opinion anyway and how I see it. There's also jokes about noodle code and small indie company which I love to poke fun at but I genuinely care about the whole privacy thing because it affected how I play the game and how social I want to be. Some ingame systems are actual privacy nightmares and it's readily accessible too with no way to opt out or have control over it. I kinda have really little trust in them and their implementations...

I'd like to imagine they care about this. (copium)

Isn’t this a pretty major breach of ‘virtually personal’ data? Like whether or not it’s illegal is a different story (cuz virtual) but that doesn’t change the fact that information is being made public that never should have been i.e last know location in game. I mean, imagine if you could get that kind of information on someone irl the same way*? People would be terrified lol.

Like isn’t this a potentially crushing blow to FFXIV’s legitimacy?
‘Come play our MMO where all your stalkers can track you at any given moment and we’ll delete your feedback threads about the issue’

How is anyone supposed to trust a dev team that not only enables these issues in the first place, but clearly has no intention of dealing with such a significant problem anytime in the near future. We’ll be lucky if even see them acknowledge the issue in late March when 7.2 comes out. I feel like if this happened in any other MMO it’d be red alert air raid sirens immediately until it was resolved - even if it’s just a ‘band-aid fix’ to begin with

* I’m well aware people do this irl but that doesn’t somehow make doing it virtually any less unforgivable, especially for the victim(s)

The fact this only has 6 pages, while other threads about CAR (and other things) get hundreds of pages overall with all threads combined, says a lot about the community.

I'm glad the community doesnt mind having their info out there, their entire alt list leaked for everyone to see, their retainers, soon their houses as well. Wouldnt want to hurt SE's feelings too much in this very great community.

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Originally Posted by Clockworks

The fact this only has 6 pages, while other threads about CAR (and other things) get hundreds of pages overall with all threads combined, says a lot about the community.

I'm glad the community doesnt mind having their info out there, their entire alt list leaked for everyone to see, their retainers, soon their houses as well. Wouldnt want to hurt SE's feelings too much in this very great community.

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This thread is a lot younger than the CAR threads, and also your alts being public isn't a problem unless you have terrible friends that won't leave you alone or don't want anyone to know that you have a secret ERP alt.

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Originally Posted by Clockworks

The fact this only has 6 pages, while other threads about CAR (and other things) get hundreds of pages overall with all threads combined, says a lot about the community.

I'm glad the community doesnt mind having their info out there, their entire alt list leaked for everyone to see, their retainers, soon their houses as well. Wouldnt want to hurt SE's feelings too much in this very great community.

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The other longer thread was already nuked by mods in silence

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Originally Posted by SongOfTheWind

The other longer thread was already nuked by mods in silence

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Even that one barely had 15 pages iirc in quite a few days since this came out, this should be talked about a lot more.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Isn’t this a pretty major breach of ‘virtually personal’ data? Like whether or not it’s illegal is a different story (cuz virtual) but that doesn’t change the fact that information is being made public that never should have been i.e last know location in game. I mean, imagine if you could get that kind of information on someone irl the same way*? People would be terrified lol.

Like isn’t this a potentially crushing blow to FFXIV’s legitimacy?
‘Come play our MMO where all your stalkers can track you at any given moment and we’ll delete your feedback threads about the issue’
How is anyone supposed to trust a dev team that not only enables these issues in the first place, but clearly has no intention of dealing with such a significant problem anytime in the near future. We’ll be lucky if even see them acknowledge the issue in late March when 7.2 comes out

* I’m well aware people do this irl but that doesn’t somehow make doing it virtually any less unforgivable, especially for the victim(s)

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IF I were to give them the benefit of the doubt, it might've been both the tone/content of the thread. And/or they don't want people to know what's under the hood or cause people to encourage others (unintentionally) who are scared/panicked to do something stupid that may or may not compromise them.

The more I read that thread the more paranoid/scared I became, nothing constructive or conclusive came out of it. I just felt helpless.

What they could do is shuffle our accountIDs and maybe give us renames like suggested in the other thread, is this feasable/possible to do without losing our accounts? Only the devs know. All this instigation/escalations just makes people angrier/scared which is in their right to feel angry/scared, but mix fear and misinformation then you have uninformed/scared people doing things against their better judgement out of desperation.

I do agree with you that this is a huge oversight on their end. I consider this a crisis in a way and it's been really hard for me too not to get too caught up in it. What's done is done, what can be done about it if anything? The game's systems have always enabled stalking too, I always warned my friends who join/play this game about it. This is a problem they need to acknowledge and/or address.

It was common knowledge and a ticking bomb for months already. Now that it was inevitably acted on in bad faith and getting attention of press/streamers and people just want some official recognition - it is especially detrimental to silently remove the whole threads like that. It is already too late to silence it, all you can do is react.

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Originally Posted by Rueby

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Yeah that is a fair point. As much as it’s a genuine concern it doesn’t help much to run around shouting about how bad everything is. Though, when it’s something you can’t really affect yourself it’s hard to resist not doing the only thing you really can - worrying about it lol. Not to say that making that worse for others is any better. I think it’s worth mentioning too that the first thread might’ve been removed ‘by technicality’ rather than ‘due to the content’, I.E posts using [forbidden names] or things that we’re not supposed to talk about (yet all talk about lol).

I mean, to also play dev(il)’s advocate for a moment, it’s not like we have anything to suggest they aren’t working on the issue. It’s really just a matter of faith, but with all the issues that have been compounding over the years I can see why so many people have so little of that faith left.

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Originally Posted by Clockworks

Even that one barely had 15 pages iirc in quite a few days since this came out, this should be talked about a lot more.

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People are unsure of posting here with a linked character I guess.
Also not so many people even use this forum and it is already discussed elsewhere and I guess even more people don’t know what this all even means.

Imo if not even content creators and news websites can get SE to react to such a thing then I don’t know what can.

Personally I give up here.
Feedback isn’t really listened to, regarding this here there is no response and a thread got even outright deleted.
I tried posting here in hopes of the game stepping up again but if even such a huge thing like this is just ignored I see no reason to post here any longer or to renew my sub in the foreseeable future if at all.
This issue itself is not even my biggest problem but SE outright refusing to even acknowledge the whole thing.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

People are unsure of posting here with a linked character I guess.
Also not so many people even use this forum and it is already discussed elsewhere and I guess even more people don’t know what this all even means.

Imo if not even content creators and news websites can get SE to react to such a thing then I don’t know what can.

Personally I give up here.
Feedback isn’t really listened to, regarding this here there is no response and a thread got even outright deleted.
I tried posting here in hopes of the game stepping up again but if even such a huge thing like this is just ignored I see no reason to post here any longer or to renew my sub in the foreseeable future if at all.
This issue itself is not even my biggest problem but SE outright refusing to even acknowledge the whole thing.

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I agree, typical SE to be fair, they always sweep things under the rug and wait for it to die down, it'll always be that way I'm pretty sure.

I agree. Being able to hide blacklisted characters is nice but not enough. I also think the Blacklist capping at 200 people is abysmal.

The radio silence from Square Enix days later, on a vulnerability that has already leaked the privacy of thousands of players (there was a public pastebin list floating around one of the first days of this), is pretty damning in my eyes. Any other company would have made some sort of statement, rather than just quietly deleting a forum thread and leaving us to assume the worst. Not only has that data been leaked, its in a public, searchable database. That is insanity, and trying to slip this under the rug is completely unacceptable.

I am also tired, and this will probably be the tipping point that causes me to unsubscribe if it continues to go unaddressed. I refuse to give money to a corp that just doesn't care about the privacy of its users, which is what the radio silence says to me.

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Originally Posted by WutWut

The radio silence from Square Enix days later, on a vulnerability that has already leaked the privacy of thousands of players (there was a public pastebin list floating around one of the first days of this), is pretty damning in my eyes. Any other company would have made some sort of statement, rather than just quietly deleting a forum thread and leaving us to assume the worst. Not only has that data been leaked, its in a public, searchable database. That is insanity, and trying to slip this under the rug is completely unacceptable.

I am also tired, and this will probably be the tipping point that causes me to unsubscribe if it continues to go unaddressed. I refuse to give money to a corp that just doesn't care about the privacy of its users, which is what the radio silence says to me.

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750 000 characters have been scanned to this day according to the developer of it.

That says enough lol, and that is with only 17 people scanning, once again according to the developer.

Now imagine when this goes in full release and is available to every single user that wants to get it.

Yeah, this is a worst case scenario.

Already 750k characters scanned... Which means that their data is out there and no one can erase it. And even if SE would nuke the GitHub page, you can be 100 % sure that people already forked the plugin.

Also, if the developer really is from the EU, you can be sure that almost every character on there is in this database if you played in the last days.

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Originally Posted by Shialan

Yeah, this is a worst case scenario.

Already 750k characters scanned... Which means that their data is out there and no one can erase it. And even if SE would nuke the GitHub page, you can be 100 % sure that people already forked the plugin.

Also, if the developer really is from the EU, you can be sure that almost every character on there is in this database if you played in the last days.

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There was no other outcome to this tbh.

In regard to this matter SE need to do a damn sight more than just nuking the GitHub page tbh.

F*** it. Gonna file a complaint about SE based on breach of GDPR. Its up to the authorities to decide how to proceed with Square. Couldnt care less if Square gets fined. The Radio Silence is unacceptable.

Let's assume account ID shuffling is too hard. They still need to get rid of the vulnerability, and they could still provide name changes. The Blacklist hiding people isn't a bad idea on paper, but it cannot work on this account-wide basis because it still enables abuse from someone using it maliciously. And then it's already been talked about, all the crap with even blacklisting not taking you off of friends lists and the like. Just bad design that FFXIV is not nearly old enough to be excused for. The devs need to be taking this very seriously. I believe they do take the general idea of harassment and stalking seriously. That they answer feedback about implementation for things like Duty Finder/Frontlines shows they've been aware of the need for these considerations. But then why did they decide to send raw, unhashed account data client-side when they KNOW mods and plug-ins are extremely prevalent? Whatever mindset or oversight of account security protocol led to that needs to be fixed in their offices as much as the security vulnerability itself needs to be fixed.

Well, the addon GitHub page got nuked, so developers of similar addons will go underground, and players will not have an option to opt out anymore.

I sincerely hope that SE will take measures to hide account IDs from plain sight.

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Originally Posted by LibitIncarne

This thread is a lot younger than the CAR threads, and also your alts being public isn't a problem unless you have terrible friends that won't leave you alone or don't want anyone to know that you have a secret ERP alt.

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Or are a woman and therefore by default on the radar of an entire subcommunity of degenerates that people like to pretend doesn't exist.

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Originally Posted by Argantaelle

Well, the addon GitHub page got nuked, so developers of similar addons will go underground, and players will not have an option to opt out anymore.

I sincerely hope that SE will take measures to hide account IDs from plain sight.

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Damage was already done tbh, but better late than never, I dont expect SE to take any responsibility though regarding the account ID's being basically leaked and people's alts.

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Originally Posted by Eyrilona

Or are a woman and therefore by default on the radar of an entire subcommunity of degenerates that people like to pretend doesn't exist.

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It's a good thing us women know how to blacklist/block people too.

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Originally Posted by Archmortal

Let's assume account ID shuffling is too hard. They still need to get rid of the vulnerability, and they could still provide name changes.

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A name change isn't going to fix anything. So long as your Lodestone ID is bound to your character, you will be tracked no matter what. This has been a thorn on peoples' side since its inception.

bumping this

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Originally Posted by VanillaWafer

A name change isn't going to fix anything. So long as your Lodestone ID is bound to your character, you will be tracked no matter what. This has been a thorn on peoples' side since its inception.

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That's true actually but I suppose now we have the option to private our lodestone, it's hardly enough. In light of all this, I privated my lodestone (I don't know if it matters at all at this point but that's the only thing I could do). I wish they took privacy more seriously in general...it's so weird to pay for a rename but have it effectively be pointless.

Was the lodestone a thing from the start? If so did it really take them almost a decade to allow people to private their lodestone?

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Originally Posted by VanillaWafer

A name change isn't going to fix anything. So long as your Lodestone ID is bound to your character, you will be tracked no matter what. This has been a thorn on peoples' side since its inception.

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I think you already know I'm well aware of that. Mitigating factors still help. None of it will matter if they don't even fix the information vulnerability but if they do at least that much everything else becomes possible to manage instead of being in freefall. The question is will SE dedicate the work to fixing the account ID problem now that so many hundreds of thousands have been compromised. Cuz when I say "let's assume it's too hard" what I mean is "let's assume they aren't willing to do it." They CAN do it, it's well within their ability to do so and for us to lose nothing in the process. But it's a lot of work.

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Originally Posted by Archmortal

I think you already know I'm well aware of that. Mitigating factors still help. None of it will matter if they don't even fix the information vulnerability but if they do at least that much everything else becomes possible to manage instead of being in freefall. The question is will SE dedicate the work to fixing the account ID problem now that so many hundreds of thousands have been compromised. Cuz when I say "let's assume it's too hard" what I mean is "let's assume they aren't willing to do it." They CAN do it, it's well within their ability to do so and for us to lose nothing in the process. But it's a lot of work.

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CAN they do it? Are you familiar with the specifics of their system? Is it compatible with everything else and they're just lazy like you say? You're 100% certain?

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Originally Posted by Lilapop

CAN they do it? Are you familiar with the specifics of their system? Is it compatible with everything else and they're just lazy like you say? You're 100% certain?

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You're not going to get any favors by simping for a multi billions company.

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Originally Posted by Clockworks

You're not going to get any favors by simping for a multi billions company.

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I didn't know simping = asking if they have any idea how to work with Square's proprietary systems. My bad! Let me pull out one of your tactics real quick. Ahem.

You and I disagree, therefore you have to be trolling.

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Originally Posted by Eyrilona

Or are a woman and therefore by default on the radar of an entire subcommunity of degenerates that people like to pretend doesn't exist.

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It's a good thing that there are no women on the internet then. Why are you telling them that?

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Originally Posted by LibitIncarne

It's a good thing that there are no women on the internet then. Why are you telling them that?

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I've had people approach me when I was on a male character AND female character, some people in this game are hella desperate for them pixels. Some were actually quite creepy too. Imagine complimenting someone's plate/glam but being an absolute creep about it.

The damage is already done even if the GitHub gets taken down:
1. The GitHub page is just temporarily removed; if GitHub somehow finds it okay it can be reinstated.
2. Doesn't matter if it's not because there's alternate forks and repos already, and the dev has already stated that he may set up a privately hosted version. Complied versions can be found on filesharing sites. Apperently there's a repo on another site similar to GitHub already.
3. Database is still there