Blizzard's Spywear Reads Personal Data

This post regards an infringement of privacy by spyware that is part of the WoW install. I hope that people will keep this post active or that it will be made sticky due to its vitally important nature. I also hope that it will not be removed by Blizzard, but if it is I'm sure I'll post about that too. This will be copied onto a few other popular boards on these forums in order to assure wide circulation.

I just read several articles and a legal document that discuss issues with a spyware program that runs every 15 seconds while WoW.EXE is open. "Warden" is designed to detect third-party programs with the intent of catching cheaters and hackers who have violated the EULA and TOU aggreements. Okay, that's good. Those are legally binding documents and they keep cheaters from ruining the fun of honest players. But Warden also "uses the GetWindowTextA function to read the window text in the titlebar of every window. These are windows that are not in the WoW process, but any program running on your computer," a blatent infringement on user privacy. Warden does not "collect sensitive personal data," but it does look at that data. In an excellent exhibition of logic, Corynne McSherry has said "Blizzard has a pretty skewed idea of privacy—we can look at your personal info, but if we don’t collect it there’s no invasion? Hardly. We also wonder how Blizzard’s executives would feel if we searched their homes, wallets, and bank accounts and read their letters and emails but didn’t write down anything we found." (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004076.php)

Exemplifying Blizzard's invasion of privacy, Greg Hoglund said, "I watched the warden sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar. These strings can easily contain social security numbers or credit card numbers, for example, if I have Microsoft Excel or Quickbooks open w/ my personal finances at the time." (http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358)

Because there has already been extensive discussion on this issue in a number of blogs, I will post the links to these articles. I'd like to mention that Greg Hoglund has developed a 3rd party, open-source program called the Governor. It detects the actions of Warden. His software does not alter WoW.EXE, does not tamper with Warden, will not help you cheat, hack or gain any advantage in or out of game. All it does it tell you what Warden is watching. Since it is a third-party program, it is a technically bannable offense to run it. However, I intend to run it to find out what Blizzard can see on my computer and I urge everyone who reads this to do the same. If they ban us, I'm sure that a class-action lawsuit would be in order if we have any hopes of defending our constitutional rights to privacy and freedom of speech in this cut-throat world of internet commerce.

Reference Links (I strongly urge everyone to take a look at these.):
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004076.php
http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358
http://www.rootkit.com/newsread_print.php?newsid=371 (location of Governer .rar and .zip files)

There are other related links interspersed throughout these articles.