[MUD-Dev] Real Life Consequences

[Kevin Littlejohn]

>>> "John Buehler" wrote
> > Kevin Littlejohn
> 
> > I'd actively chose not to play on any server that was involved in
> > such a system - and I suspect I'd not be alone.
> 
> Suppose the technology was such that your identity could be
> established, but the involved company couldn't actually determine
> who you were?  That is, there is a trusted third party that the game
> company can ask questions such as "are these two identities the same
> individual?", or "what's the identity number of this user?" but they
> can't ask "where does this person live?" or even "what is this
> person's name?".  Obtaining such information requires court
> intervention, just as accessing files on your personal computer
> requires court intervention.

Firstly, do you enter into such agreements when you go to your local
shopping mall?  Do they maintain a list of troublemakers they share
from place to place?  Because they're in much the same problem -
anonymous people they can't keep track of wandering through their
establishment (if you think security guards can all keep track of
who's allowed in and who's not by face or by name, I think you're
mistaken).

I find this kind of encroachment disturbing - it's small shavings off
our right to privacy.  Suddenly I find that if I piss off an admin
over here, I get banned over there, or the "trusted third party" gets
bought out by yahoo and my profile as a game player is one of the
assets, or whatever.  I don't believe "give me a reason why I
shouldn't track you" is the appropriate response here - "give me a
reason why you must" makes more sense.

I value my privacy, and I view your suggestion, even without personal
information attached, as an invasion into such - it's a patronising
manner that essentially says "we don't think we can trust our players
to be good, so we'll share information about them to make sure you're
not a bad person(tm)".  Bugger that - if that's your opinion of me,
I'll take my business elsewhere, where I might have to risk (*gasp*)
meeting a bad person and seeing the admins deal with them, but where I
won't have to hope that my actions elsewhere in unconnected forums
will get me banned/persecuted, and where I know your first response to
my joining you isn't to check a third party database to see if I'm
acceptable.

Secondly, I've known too many cops and seen too much of the sharing of
information that goes on to believe that a "trusted third party" can
be trusted, or that court orders are always required, or so on -
people are people, the world over, and if that information is
collected it _will_ be misused - if not systematically against me,
then occasionally against random individuals.  Scale doesn't matter to
me here - you setup a list of people who play games and what games
they play (and how they behave in those games), it will be used for
other than it's intended purpose eventually, officially or no.

Finally, biometrics won't help you as much as you seem to think - at
the end of the day, someone will front up to an organisation, get a
biometric reading, present their 100 points of id (australian term
probably, we have to present id to the value of 100 points to open
bank accounts or similar, drivers licences and birth certificates and
credit cards and so forth all have varying point values attached), and
say "I am that person" - and carry away a token they can use to
identify themselves online.  Then every time they play your game, or
sign up, or whatever, they'll present the token.  If you're talking
about anything else, you're talking about selling them hardware and
waiting for them to figure out the protocol, ala various gadgets that
have become linux boxes lately - you can engineer against that, but
inevitably something will break somewhere and you'll have to upgrade
boxes or whatever - basically, box in every home seems overboard to
me.

There's ample space there for fsckups - firstly, duplicate biometric
readings for different people are possible under most systems to
varying degrees, second paying someone for their biometric data to
create a new person would become possible (unless you're talking about
a global biometric database, in which case I think you'll face massive
opposition - the cost is a little higher than the gain there ;), third
you're trusting the third party that maintains the database to have
flawless methods - it's interesting to see the amount of fraud
perpetrated on systems like that by insiders who know the system, it's
usually fairly high.  Fourthly, I can't imagine anyone with enough
infrastructure to collect such biometrics just for online gaming - so
they're presumably using that data for other purposes, unstated at
this time.  Fifth, there's loaning and stealing tokens/access
information for tokens - I give my password to my SO periodically so
she can do stuff, parents give their kids their passwords frequently,
we're back to "it's not who you think it is" (that's consensual,
loaning info out - don't even think about it being stolen, or the
process you go through if your house is burgaled an your passphrase is
on a sticky note on the monitor).

You're impinging on my ease of using your product, simply so you can
check whether I'm an acceptable user to you.  At the end of the day,
that's all it is.  Come down from your tower, understand your game
doesn't mean that much to me, and I'm not willing to grant you that
sort of power just so I can play it. Hell, you're the one arguing for
supporting casual players - I don't care to give any "trusted third
party" that sort of tracking information just so I can casually play
your game.

KevinL

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