#0 - July 7, 2010, 7:37 p.m.
http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints/data_protection.aspx
I would say this comes under
How do I know if my problem is a data protection problem?
2 Personal information about you is used, held or disclosed:
* unfairly
* for a reason that is not the one it was collected for, or
* without proper security.
This is in relation to accounts being compromised and then used to post on the forums without your knowledge/permission.
Blizzard do not adequetly protect against this possibly occurance, and historically true as many hacked accounts have been used to post links to keylogger sites etc.
Even if you pay (it is not truely free as you still have to pay P&P) for an authenticator it will not protect you against this issue as authenticator only prevents access to the game and not to the forums.
Thus the only way to prevent this would be to provide truely free authenticators for everyone and require them for access to the forums.
This is what i wrote if people are looking for inspiration:-
My issue is with the potential release of personal information due to the lack of security provided by Blizzard and the ability for someone to release personal information about me without my permission, namely my real name, and associate it with my account and characters within the game. Through the new forum rules they are planning to implement as is spelt out in this post by the forum moderator called Vaneras in this forum thread.
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=13816838128&sid=1
The aspect which concerns me is in regard to information about me being held, used or disclosed without proper security.
In specific the ability for someone to gain my account details, which happens to many people on a daily basis, through for example phishing emails and sites and also through sites which install key logging tools onto people PC's. Links for such site are often also posted on the forums involved by accounts which have been compromised in such ways and can stay on the forum for up to 24hrs at a time due to lack of moderation of the forums.
And for the person who gains that account information to then be able to post on the Warcraft forums and in doing so give away my name in relation to that account and also those unscrupulous sites as when posting after the change your real name will be given as your 'forum name' rather than your alias.
The company do not provide adequate, free, security to ensure the safety of peoples accounts from use by 3rd parties which gain access to it by illegitimate means, such as by using that account to post on the Warcraft forums, therefore not adequately protecting the privacy of their information, namely account holders real names, from being exposed on the publicly visible Warcraft forums.
In short someone can gain access to my account information, use that information to gain access to the Warcraft forums and post messages which will automatically contain my real name as my real name will be used as my forum name after the change and i am not permitted to provide an alias to prevent this as it is a condition of opening a gaming and therefore forum account, as you need a gaming account to post on the forums, that you give your real name to the account as is pointed out here
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.shtml
Specifically under the heading "establishing an account".
After i followed these rules and therefore provided my real name i am no longer allowed to change it under any circumstances.
I'm not exactly skilled in these sort of correspondences so feel free to write your own complaint and improve on my wording.
Also posted in the official thread but shamelessly posted here to help it come better to people attention.
