Apple's Game Center Shares Your Real Name

dotarray writes "Apple's Game Center has just made itself a few enemies through a simple change to their Terms of Service. Now, whenever you send a friend invitation, your real name will be attached as well as your Apple ID." Apparently they didn't learn from the poor reaction to Blizzard's similar idea.

Re:First Impression

[spagetti_code]

Have you actually *read* the iPhone contract? I'm surprised they didn't require blood.

When I got my iPhone, I asked to read the contract.
The store workers had never had anyone ask, so they didn't know where it was.
Took them a long time to find a copy.
It was pretty nasty, but from memory (they wouldn't let me keep their
only copy now that they knew where it was) the worst section was something of the form:

"if we suspect you may have altered your phone, you agree to let us cancel
your phone service, and you will keep paying out the rest of your term."

Suspicion (not proof, just if they felt like it) was enough to give them the right
to cancel my phone service (and reclaim the phone phone IIRC) and I had to
keep paying. the monthly fee. And there was no
appeal or ability to protest your innocence.

Re:Blizzard RealID does the same

[Montezumaa]

You can add people without sharing your real name in either the World of Warcraft, or through the Battle.net service for Starcraft 2(SC2) and other games. You can choose you share your real name with others, when adding them as a friend, or you can choose not to.

not quite like Blizzard

[Achoi77]

I figured Apple's intention is to thwart spammers; if you were able to recognize the real name of your buddy you were more likely accept the invitation rather than someone with a username like "THISISNOTVIAGRASPAM." Playing the whole social angle.

What Blizzard was intending was different. They wanted to put paper trail on all users on a publicly viewable form, in the interest of minimizing trolls and thus improving the quality of posts on their forums - to 'shame' the trolls from posting mindless drivel. Yeah, that didn't work out too well.

The difference between Apple and Blizzard

[Sharp-kun]

The difference between this and Blizzard's RealID is that RealID is a service on tp of the normal friends system in WoW - you can friend someone without giving your name, you just don't get as much info (see what char/server they're on at any time etc). Blizzard marketed it as something to use with people you actually know, not that Death Knight you thought was hot that one evening in Gundrak". That to me made it a lot less objectionable since there was no obligation to use it with all my friends. Apple on the other hand seem to be going with this by default.

Re:First Impression

[khchung]

Welcome to the broken America mobile market. In places where the market actually has competition, eg, Asia , we can buy phones without contract and then use whichever carrier we like, and switch carrier whenever we like. If you enter into a contact with the carrier, you can do so without telling them what's model is your phone (none of their business anyway), and your can change/jb your phone without affecting the contract.

Re:it's apple

[delinear]

Blizzard tried to introduce this feature to an already existing community of anonymous people. Apple introduced the Game Center and Ping services as a way to interact with your family and friends. It was never intended to be a free-for-all, anonymous community and lots of people accept this.

Never intended? Maybe some should tell Apple that, they seem to think otherwise [apple.com]:

Game Center lets friends — and soon-to-be-friends — in on the action. Invite someone to join, then get a game going. Or go up against people you don’t know, from anywhere in the world, in a multiplayer game.

Emphasis mine, wording very much Apple's.

Re:Kiinda like Liberals cheering for Wikileaks

[delinear]

The way this works in reality, people send friend requests to complete strangers all the time. Say you've trawled through hundreds of idiots in various online games and you finally meet someone who matches your play style and seems like they'd be fun to play with again. You can either send them a friend request while not really knowing the first thing about them, or you can hope that, over the course of hundreds more games, you will meet them multiple times until you eventually consider them a real friend. Most people go with the former, you wouldn't necessarily want to send that person your name.

Re:First Impression

[DJRumpy]

Amazing. I love how the Anti-Apple folks on Slashdot are so quick to jump on the bandwagon based on hearsay without the slightest bit of proof offered except for word of mouth.

Here is the Oh So Elusive customer agreement. it's offered with every phone. I seriously doubt the AT&T store couldn't give you a copy. It's freely available on the web.

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/legal/index.jsp?q_termsKey=wirelessCustomerAgreement&q_termsName=Wireless+Customer+Agreement&print=true#whatIsTheTermOfMyService [att.com]

FYI, jailbreaking is legal, so it doesn't meet the definition of 'unlawful' in the contract. In addition, this won't satisfy your anti-Apple craving because the contract is with AT&T, not Apple.

if we have reasonable cause to believe that your Equipment is being used for an unlawful purpose or in a way that (i) is harmful to, interferes with, or may adversely affect our Services or the network of any other provider, (ii) interferes with the use or enjoyment of Services received by others, (iii) infringes intellectual property rights, (iv) results in the publication of threatening or offensive material, or (v) constitutes spam or other abusive messaging or calling, a security risk, or a violation of privacy,

Of course what you do with that phone after it's jailbroken is up to you. You might also try to remember the fact that every cell provider has similar verbiage in regards to unauthorized tethering, IP Rights, etc. If you opt to break the contract after signing it, then that is your responsibility, not theirs.