Clarification on "Personal Information"

So, the very short answer is "whatever" and yes, you can set your nick as your personal name if that's what makes you happy in life. The nickname limit is also antiquated as the /Nick command now enforces a limit, but Sami wasn't wrong to quote the rules.

The long answer, which I urge you to read, is that yes, we do have players with aspects of their real name as their username - Ian__D, joshual1996, etc. But are there not likely thousands of Ian D.'s and Joshua L.'s out there? Do you know which one they are based off their username? However, as you say, your name is very distinct. So distinct, in fact, that in under five minutes with only your name and profile picture I was able to find your home address, where you work, where you went to high school and college, what car you might drive, and more.

What could I do with this information? I probably couldn't cause any real harm, but I could definitely be annoying. I could put your phone number, email, and address on every spam/robocall/etc list known to man easily. I could mail you a glitter bomb. In just five minutes I have almost all I need to get your tax records, I'm only missing your SSN and a few minor details.

I'm sure with a little more digging I could find information about your family and friends too. What if I found your partner's phone number and texted them as someone you were having an affair with? As someone who's been on the receiving end of doxxing attacks, it's not fun and I don't recommend it. It's not even hard, too. The amount of information in public record and social media is astonishing.

Tl;Dr, don't reveal your exact personal info, for your own safety. The internet is a potentially scary place, and even though we're quick to deal with them, we get a lot of people that intend to do actual harm to our server's members.

Furthermore, I want to emphasize that anything that goes into Global or any other moderated aspects of the server is upheld entirely at the discretion of the staff based on established guidelines we've laid out for just about every major situation, in addition to the standard server rules. If Sami asked you to change your name, you should have changed it, then if you disagreed with the decision you could have poked a higher staff member for clarity. ECC's staff are staff members because they do good and mean well, and you should generally respect the decisions they make. We're all here to play and don't want to see anyone get hurt.

 

I want to share a couple stories with you @mypolopony, and I hope that it encourages you to at least think before giving out your personal information again.

Now there is a difference in this story, no personal information was given out, only an email address, something that you freely give out on just about any website you sign up on. So my dad is almost 80 years old and he signed up for a company website to order car parts off of. He is a car enthusiast, he has a few very old cars he restored and obviously the parts for them can be very tricky and costly to find these days. Anyways he turned to the internet and I warned him to not put in his card information to buy things, but rather use something like PayPal as it’s more secure. He ended up not buying anything off that site, he never put in his card or bank info, not even his name because he isn’t very computer savvy. Yes he had an account, but it only had his username and email that he signed up with on it. A few days later he checks his bank account to see how much money he had and his account was cleaned out... both of them! Because of this, it caused him to almost lose the house because he didn’t have any money to pay the taxes and we got that notice our house was going up for auction. We literally were almost homeless because my dad simply signed up on a website with NO personal information.

There was another situation when my son was 10 and on Roblox playing with people and he did as 10 years olds do without thought... he told someone his real full name and address! Within mins his Roblox account got taken over by someone and they tried to buy all kinds of stuff on his account (stuff that costs real money). Thank god I play things smart and linked all his accounts to my email to get the notifications of what was going on and that I never put my bank info on his Roblox account (I instead buy him the disposable cards when he wants to add cash to his account or buy something), that could have ended very badly for me, but it did give me and opportunity to drive the point home about never giving out his personal information. Which he was never able to recover his Roblox account and had to make a new one.

It’s not just about people “stalking you”, it’s about people stealing your money, stealing your identity, and completely messing your life up. This game is meant for kids and kids will always say way too much about themselves, it’s what kids do, so that rule is in place and enforced to protect people (specially kids). I encourage you to not dismiss this as a “oh it’s just my name” type thing because sadly your name in the hands of an asshole can ruin your life these days. Besides there is so many other ways for people to see your name, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram... no need to tell people anything about you, if they want to know, they can find out anyways. Scary thought, I know! Sometimes I think it’s safer to live off the grid. Just be smart about things, I would really hate to see anything bad happen to you simply because you gave your name to someone.

TL;DR To clarify, the rule is there to protect every ECC player, you may think simply giving out your name isn’t a big deal, but there are people out there who just can’t wait to screw you over.

 

Let me make it more simple for you from a different perspective.
It's not allowed because I have no way to prove you are who you say you are.
For all I know you could be using your worst enemies personal information, pictures, etc, to get people on their bad side, and cause real life harm to someone who isn't even you.

 

I’ll give one more example, this one with Minecraft. It’s no secret I used to be on staff for a different server back in 2014, so I was in basically the front lines for issues. About a few weeks before I resigned, there was an incident that happened where someone shared their full name and the state they live in. Now I was on build staff, so I don’t know the full details, but what I heard, someone found their house and basically stalked them to the point where they needed to move.

Not saying this is going to happen to you if you give your name etc. or that ECC isn’t a safe place, but it’s best to be careful on the internet regarding personal info; it’s not worth risking it.

 

If you think that idea is antiquated, then you are mistaken. I won't go into detail, but this is something that still happens, and has happened to me personally. And I'm sure that it will happen again. Sure, most people will probably just see the name and be like "Pfff, whatever" and not think any more of it but there are absolutely people out there that will use that information to their advantage, and your disadvantage.

Personally I like discouraging people from sharing their information in global chat and publicly on the server. It goes back to what others have said above, lots of people online are kids and young people who don't know much better and don't fully understand the consequences of what that means. Even people who do realize what it means to publicize your personal information aren't exactly doing themselves any favors by sharing that.

What a lot of people don't realize is that once you put your information out online, then it stays there forever. Period. You can delete posts, edit out information, or remove photographs, but people will still see it before it goes down, they will save your photos, every last bit of information they can get about you, and you can't force people to forget that information or prevent them from using it. You don't seem to have a problem sharing this information today, but what about in the future? You don't want the fact that your name is public information to bite you in the ass further down the road.

There's a reason why video games like Minecraft have you create a username rather than just having you play online with random strangers using your actual name.

 

Wow @EtherealSquid doesn't even @ me when using me as an example.

 

I agree what andrew said. There is a possibility that you may not be the one who you are saying you are. So this is not all about "i'm okay with that so why do you care" thing. I never thought about that before though

 

Yup, we've had the above happen in the past ^ it sucks.