Recently some World of Warcraft avatars might have become more social and communicative than their owners/players. Why? Advertising Revenues?
Blizzard Entertainment has recently decided not only the expand its in-game-auctioning services but also to introduce kind of a twitter service (WoW-Armory), forwarding relevant information from inside the online-game (level gains, achievements, boss kills, for more information please see the FAQ’s) right into the web, iPhones and Facebook. As The Basic Thinking blog has reported, this has caused uproar among the players of the online game. However, economic pressure seems to have won over privacy aspects.
For an excellent legal analysis under Austrian law (in German) please refer to virtuellewelten.at, which points out that Blizzard Entertainment has boldly declared in its Privacy Policy that “Blizzard deems it a point of honour that the information you send us should be protected and should remain in its original form, i.e. unaltered.”. However, there are of course a couple of loopholes in Blizzard’s Privacy Policy which might bee seen as a coverage for their new service…
So, which is left to do for employers is to find out their employees World of Warcraft Avatar name … and over are the days of unexplainable illnesses as the Armory Service not only reports about the in-game-development but the precise time and date of any such a development.
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I however expect that it will be just a matter of time until search engines as 123people.com and others will provide such a service, matching real life people with their avatars.which will make surveying people much easier than before.
Or how about combining TweetPsych and WoW-Armory… wouldn’t that be interesting, drawing psychological profile based on the activities of an avatar? (If you don’t know what I mean, spend some time investigating the avatar of a friend and you will soon discover interesting aspects ;).
PS: Please note the “Liar’s Tongue“, a true jurist-goodie I reckon!
Austrotrabant's Blog 
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