Please Address the Account Identification and Privacy Issue Before Region-Matching

[itsmehi]

With the ongoing implementation of same-region player matching in Patch 7.58, I feel there is an important privacy and player-safety issue that SE needs to address.

I'm referring to the EchoVault (EV) plugin & website, & the underlying account-identification system that makes it possible to link multiple characters to the same service account.

The problem is bigger than one website.

As EV explains, the game client receives an identifier associated with a player's service account. This identifier allows characters belonging to the same account to be recognised & linked together.

When a player blocks someone, they should be protected from that person's alts as well. That is an important safety feature, particularly for players dealing with harassment, stalking/unwanted contact.

However, the problem is that the same underlying mechanism also makes it possible for 3rd parties to identify & associate characters belonging to other players.

As EV acknowledges, session-scoped identifiers are still compared within a session. Information can also potentially be accumulated across multiple sessions & observers over time.

Why this matters even more with the upcoming changes

With Patch 7.58, players across all logical data centres within the same physical region will be able to interact through expanded matchmaking.

Players should be able to join duties, use PF, meet new people & interact with the wider community w/out having their different characters identified, associated & potentially tracked by 3rd-party databases. This is particularly concerning for players who keep their characters separate for personal, social or privacy reasons.

There is already a proposed technical solution.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the EV website has published an explanation of how the problem could be resolved:

https://echovault.gg/accountid

The proposal is to move the account-wide blacklist identification process to the server side. Instead of giving every client an identifier that allows characters to be compared against one another, the server could independently determine whether a character belongs to an account that the viewing player has blocked.

The client would only need to receive the result of that check.

This would preserve the intended account-wide blacklist protection without exposing a reusable or comparable identifier that 3rd-party tools could use to associate unrelated players' characters.

Importantly, this would address the underlying issue rather than simply making the information harder to obtain.

I want to be clear that this isn't about preventing people from using 3rd-party tools simply because they exist. It is about protecting players from having their different characters linked together without their knowledge/consent.

Privacy should be enforced at the source, expanding the player pool should not come at the expense of player privacy & safety.

[Yodada]

Maybe we should look up Yoshi-Ps Charakter...

[Wyssahtyn]

devs aren't technically skilled enough to fix their own problem. why do you think they went with the laziest option that created this whole mess in the first place?

[Shialan]

Won't happen.


It took them 14 years to even implement such a basic function because they don't understand the issues.


Like...they still haven't changed that you get removed from the others friend list if you remove them because Japanese people could feel slighted.

[ZephyrMenodora]

When playing with that AI thread I found the stalker site and was just curious what legitimate reason anyone would have to know what zone I am most often in?

It's very odd and no way I'm going to give them even more data to try to get them to remove it.

[dosomethingplease]

I wish they would do something but I've lost hope at this point. While we still pay them a sub, they won't care about this.

[Neroshii]

I set all my characters to "private" and someone told me it doesn't matter before linking me the EV page of my main. Sure enough, it jumped up over 100 sightings in a couple of hours, and had logged even the gearset changes I made in that time frame. Guess someone is using the feature that abuses the player search function... Really creepy shit.