As someone who is quite focused on privacy, I understand the idea behind it. However, I agree with Vintage here - it could easily become far too difficult to define the line between allowed and illegal information.

This is a nice example of the difficulty in drawing the line.

Answering the question of the country - let us take a very small country as an example, e.g. Monaco (2km², 37800 inhabitants)* - can be a lot more specific than asking for the province of a larger country or even more specific than mentioning towns, e.g. London (1.572 km², 8.5 million inhabitants)**.

*Source: German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Staaten_der_Erde
**Source: German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/London

Why should discussion of the country be allowed if it can be more accurate than discussion of the town? Would it be judged by the number of inhabitants or by the region's area? There are simply far too many variables.

I will stop here because I might drift into a discussion about people voluntarily posting personal information on some parts of the internet and thinking that nobody would find them; associating pieces of information with others. This discussion doesn't fit the thread right now.

So basically I could tell a new player personal information about me and tell them to say it in global, hoping that they don't take screenshots because they are new. This would be a very easy way for trolls to get new players banned or older players who returned after a break and didn't know about the rule change yet.

 

The problem:

If someone posts personal information about you, it is likely that this information has been collected from other parts of the internet (e.g. social media), which means that it has already been exposed. Drawing a line between personal and exposed data would mean that you could only prosecute a player if the data they published cannot be found with a proper internet search.

 

This is much too harsh and too complicated. I can tell you it's okay to say my info, and you'll still get a 24 hour tempban for doing something I said was okay?

Right now here's my list of personal info that I consider "generally" personal (considering most of my actual personal info has been available one way or the other).
> Name
> Direct Contact Info (email, phone #, address)
> Names of schools, locations, etc
> Directly Identifiable Info - SSN/Passport#/Etc

I do agree we need some form of harsher punishments for this.
It shouldn't be too harsh though, for two reasons:
1. Absurd punishments just lose players.
2. People can only give out your information if you have made it available in some way. If there's information you don't want made available, it shouldn't be available.

 

That I can agree with. I'd even go with 12-24 hours on a first offense.

 

24 hours for private information isn't absurd.
3 months, like the comment I was actually replying to with that post, is.

 

I'll be writing up/editing the staff guidelines soon after discussing this with the other ServerAdmins.

 

Could you provide the update of the guidelines? I feel like this is important as players may use/ discuss personal information and be punished from it after this has changed.

 

Sure, but it will probably mostly be things that really shouldn't be being discussed either way.