SE Please start caring about your players privacy.

[Rueby]

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.

--

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.

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.

[VanillaWafer]

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.

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

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.

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

[Tint]

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

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.

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

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.

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

[MiaBlaze-Cari]

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.

[Argantaelle]

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.

[NaoSen]

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.

[Infindox]

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

[caffe_macchiato]

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?

[Rueby]

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

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)

[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 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)