TheBrasse Comic: Too Much Information

[Brasse]

<p>There are things that I really don't want to know about other players. Seriously.</p><p>I was really glad to learn that SOE did NOT release chat logs as part of the 60TB of server data they donated to science.</p><p>Cause ya know... that would have been <a href="http://www.thebrasse.com/game-comics/268" target="_blank"><strong>Too Much Information</strong></a>.</p><p>;-)#</p><p>Brasse</p>

[Zabjade]

<p><span style="color: #00cc00;">We both need to badger SOE to make comics of the game and hire both of us ;p </span></p>

[Calain80]

My 1st though was about the <a href="http://tmi-comic.com/">Too Much Information</a> "Comic". <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> But I can't believe SOE gave someone else actual numbers on how many people log in each day, if you think how well they hide these numbers all the time. Would be nice, if you could find these numbers somewhere inside the surveys.

[GrunEQ]

<p><span style="font-size: small; font-family: comic sans ms,sans-serif;">I did see 400,000.  So I guess that we can gather that's how many active accounts there are.</span></p>

[Calain80]

400,000 is the total number of accounts that were ever created in EQ2 over a 4 year period.

[Peysel]

<p>   I did enjoy the comic, I always do enjoy them <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>   In my personal opinion I think they lied about the information they disclosed, there is no way some of those conclusions could have been reached without certain information.  I notice they made no announcement here on the boards about it either, which means they know the Station Players news doesn't get looked at that much and they're trying to hide it in the open, just so they can turn around at some point and say 'Hey!  we did tell everybody, look!'. </p><p>  I'm really not happy about this at all, though I have personally never engaged any of the wierd stuff some of the players do, I am concerned that if they did secretly hand over chat logs, that personal phone numbers and addresses exchanged by guildies and such for real world meetings were in there.</p><p>  The other thing is that when you spend a lot of time playing with some people, you develop friendships of a sort, and you share things that you wouldn't necessarily disclose to the server as a whole, you might help eachother through rough spots in your life, but you certainly don't want some strange person looking at your conversations and 'having a laugh' at them.  It's just wrong.  EULA nothing, this is an ethical issue.</p><p>  Then there is the Personally Identifiable Information (PII), how could they come to the conclusion that female players were more likely to get their play time wrong without that information?  They would HAVE to have access to account information for that.  Also how do they know that people from the same regions are more likely to play together without account information? </p><p>  Something smells, but that's just my personal opinion and thoughts on the issue, though Hubby does feel the same way too. </p><p>He wondered how their data came to 60Tb without the chat logs.  If the information is such that it can be freely shared according to the EULA, then surely we have the right to view our information that was disclosed, by law? </p><p>  I want to know exactly what was in that information that was apparently not personally identifiable.  I want access to the 60Tb of data.  If it's harmless they can publicly publish it on the internet so we can access it.</p>

[Southwitch]

<p>Gender and region is not personally identifiable information. How many females are there in the US even (and people from all over the world play EQ2)? I'm female and I live in the SE United States. Oh no, now you can identify me! <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" /></p><p>Thats all just demographic data, and its widely available from many places. I think few people really understand how that kind of research works. Even if they had access to your personally identifiable info, it would be completely meaningless and they'd most likely remove it from the datasets. Thats standard practice when doing most research, elimination of useless datapoints.</p>

[Peysel]

<p>How do they know that those particular females didn't give the correct info though?  To know that they would need the account data for that particular female to compare their responses with their actual account data  Think about it.</p>

[ke'la]

<p><cite>Peysel@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>How do they know that those particular females didn't give the correct info though?  To know that they would need the account data for that particular female to compare their responses with their actual account data  Think about it.</p></blockquote><p>Very simple Player 10232123129437514382751271, fills out an volintary servey from thier station account, the then log in and play the game, they are still player 10232123129437514382751271 as that was the code that is asigned to thier account. SoE then passes both the Servay and the Logs(minus the chat logs) to the researchers and the researchers cross referances the info  player 10232123129437514382751271 gave the Survay with the info from the game logs and the got their conclusion. At no time do the researchers get the information that player 1023212312943751438275127's real name is Jane Doe and she lives at 1500 Pennivania Ave, Washinton DC.</p><p>BTW, giving out Demo info like Player 10232123129437514382751271 is female(according to what "she" told us ("she" could lie)) and lives in Sacrmento, CA also does not readly identify anyone nor is it really personal info, as there are over 300k people in Sacramento and like 2mil or so in the Sac Metro area(where people say they are from Sacrmento but really are not).</p><p><cite>Peysel@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>   I did enjoy the comic, I always do enjoy them <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p><p>   In my personal opinion I think they lied about the information they disclosed, there is no way some of those conclusions could have been reached without certain information.  I notice they made no announcement here on the boards about it either, which means they know the Station Players news doesn't get looked at that much and they're trying to hide it in the open, just so they can turn around at some point and say 'Hey!  we did tell everybody, look!'. </p><p>  I'm really not happy about this at all, though I have personally never engaged any of the wierd stuff some of the players do, I am concerned that if they did secretly hand over chat logs, that personal phone numbers and addresses exchanged by guildies and such for real world meetings were in there.</p><p>  The other thing is that when you spend a lot of time playing with some people, you develop friendships of a sort, and you share things that you wouldn't necessarily disclose to the server as a whole, you might help eachother through rough spots in your life, but you certainly don't want some strange person looking at your conversations and 'having a laugh' at them.  It's just wrong.  EULA nothing, this is an ethical issue.</p><p>  Then there is the Personally Identifiable Information (PII), how could they come to the conclusion that female players were more likely to get their play time wrong without that information?  They would HAVE to have access to account information for that.  Also how do they know that people from the same regions are more likely to play together without account information? </p><p>  Something smells, but that's just my personal opinion and thoughts on the issue, though Hubby does feel the same way too. </p><p><span style="color: #ffff00;">He wondered how their data came to 60Tb without the chat logs. </span> If the information is such that it can be freely shared according to the EULA, then surely we have the right to view our information that was disclosed, by law? </p><p>  I want to know exactly what was in that information that was apparently not personally identifiable.  I want access to the 60Tb of data.  If it's harmless they can publicly publish it on the internet so we can access it.</p></blockquote><p>As far as getting 60TBs of info without chat logs... Um do you ever run a parse? those logs get very big, very fast, and that is only loging chat + combat actions. The SoE logs are EVERYTHING you do, opening your inventory is logged, moving something from one slot to another, heck the contents when you open them, every time you search on the broker, just walking from one place to another, absolutly every action you do in game is logged, Multiply that by say by the number of users in a given day(remembering that we are talking about 400k players over 4years), and then times that by 1460(number of days in 4years) and you can easily see how 60TBs of data without chat logs can build up.</p>

[Peysel]

<p>I didn't realise the surveys were tied into the station account itself, surveys I'd taken part in in the past for EA didn't require logging into my account, which is how I thought it was done here, you can probably see why I was thinking the way I was.  Obviously I was wrong <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />  Nothing new there.</p><p>Parses?  Me?  Is this a joke?  I can barely make sense of the dev speak in update notes let alone understand of a parse full of jibberish, so I really couldn't tell how big they grow, I've tried and failed.  Fear my uber skillz! Not.</p>

[ke'la]

<p><cite>Peysel@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I didn't realise the surveys were tied into the station account itself, surveys I'd taken part in in the past for EA didn't require logging into my account, which is how I thought it was done here, you can probably see why I was thinking the way I was.  Obviously I was wrong <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />  Nothing new there.</p><p>Parses?  Me?  Is this a joke?  I can barely make sense of the dev speak in update notes let alone understand of a parse full of jibberish, so I really couldn't tell how big they grow, I've tried and failed.  Fear my uber skillz! Not.</p></blockquote><p>I rarely parce either but I have pulled logs befor for Zam's Lucy2 project. And that file was a few hundered MBs in about a month of pulling logs, and again that is not nearly the amount of data SoE logs.</p>

[Southwitch]

<p><cite>Peysel@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I didn't realise the surveys were tied into the station account itself, surveys I'd taken part in in the past for EA didn't require logging into my account, which is how I thought it was done here, you can probably see why I was thinking the way I was.  Obviously I was wrong <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />  Nothing new there.</p><p>Parses?  Me?  Is this a joke?  I can barely make sense of the dev speak in update notes let alone understand of a parse full of jibberish, so I really couldn't tell how big they grow, I've tried and failed.  Fear my uber skillz! Not.</p></blockquote><p>The survey done a while back rewarded you with an item, which couldn't have been done if it wasn't tied to your account. I don't recall much about the questions asked, so I have no idea which of the conclusions they're publishing could have been based off that survey. I do vaguely remember it asking gender and age group, things like that.</p><p>If its any comfort, inside SOE's data, your account and each of your characters is identified by a random number anyway. Thats how databases keep track of things, by ID numbers rather than names. So as ke'la says, its more like Player 10232123129437514382751271 logged in at 12:04:13 in all the data instead of Peysel logged in.</p><p>And to your earlier comment, they don't know that the respondent didn't lie about gender, etc. on the survey. But your account info doesn't contain that anyway, that I'm aware of. I just looked at my account and I didn't see it.</p>

[Brook]

<p>I think they got all the data including chat logs. It doesn't matter much to me as I haven't said anything that could constitute "except in some states" any legal action against me.</p><p>Really if you think about it your talking about a company that cant keep an automated transfer service working, do you think they would really go through the trouble of sorting out chat logs from the other data?</p><p>Some of the things that were said in the interview lead me to believe that personal info was shared and if you go back and read it again you will probably see the clues to it.</p><p>As far as demographic/location data its easy to get from IP numbers which is there with everything else.</p>

[ke'la]

<p><cite>Brook wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I think they got all the data including chat logs. It doesn't matter much to me as I haven't said anything that could constitute "except in some states" any legal action against me.</p><p>Really if you think about it your talking about a company that cant keep an automated transfer service working, do you think they would really go through the trouble of sorting out chat logs from the other data?</p><p>Some of the things that were said in the interview lead me to believe that personal info was shared and if you go back and read it again you will probably see the clues to it.</p><p>As far as demographic/location data its easy to get from IP numbers which is there with everything else.</p></blockquote><p>Except that if they had included 4 years of chat log data the file would be FAR larger then 60TB. Also as the Chat SERVER is seperate from the GAME server, there is no need to seperate the logs, as the Chat logs are on the Chat Server, while the Game logs would be on the Log server. I know this because the when the Chat Server goes down NO SoE game can chat(they all use the same server, that is why you can chat cross game). However, when the Game server goes down only EQ2 is effected. In fact the Chat server can and has gone down without effecting(save for the inablity to chat) the game server.</p>