News of Blizzard--the publisher behind the highly addictive game "World of Warcraft"--scanning players" computers for cheat software has players up in arms. Blizzard asserts they are only scanning hard drives for known hacks that let players cheat in the game, and that they have no interest in whatever personal information may be on users" machines because it bears no relevance to the game itself.
But as many bloggers have pointed out, it"s up to players to trust the company on that point, and that"s not an easy thing for any privacy advocate to swallow. The thing Blizzard has going for it is that the company has maintained a level of transparency surrounding the issue, a lesson Verant Interactive learned the hard way when it quietly launched a similar program with its popular online game "EverQuest" in 2000. But even the way Blizzard divulges the scanning policy to users is problematic. It appears in the game"s End User License Agreement, and who in the world reads EULAs?