ranzware
First reported by Massively OP, Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida has issued a statement on the game’s forums regarding a player-made plugin that can reveal private account details in-game. Yoshida doesn’t name a particular mod in his post, but he is almost assuredly referring to PlayerScope, a plugin that has drawn criticism from the FF14 community for compromising players’ privacy in the exact way Yoshida describes in his post.
“We have confirmed that there exist third-party tools that are being used to check FF14 character information that is not displayed during normal gameplay,” Yoshida wrote. “The tool is being used to display a segment of an FF144 character’s internal account ID, which is then used in an attempt to further correlate information on other characters on the same FF14 service account.”
In response, Yoshida says that the Square Enix Development and Operations teams are discussing a response, with their main options being requesting the mod’s removal and deletion, or “pursuing legal action” against its creators or sites hosting the mod. Yoshida stressed that player address and payment information are not at risk: “It is not possible to access this information using these third-party tools.”
A thread by user Inv0ker_of_kusH420 (nice) on r/ffxivdiscussion from earlier this month outlines the privacy violations made by PlayerScope. The main function of the mod is displaying a player’s account number, allowing one to make connections between various “alt” characters, something commenters point to as a major stalking concern. It gets worse though: Commenter wetsh0elaze actually downloaded PlayerScope to ascertain how it works. You have to log into PlayserScope with a Discord account, and the data you see with PlayerScope is uploaded to a remote server, meaning that its author is compiling a database of account numbers and their associated data.
It’s the Google Glass/Meta Ray Bans thing where not only is a user’s own privacy compromised by using this service, but everyone around them is also surveilled without their consent. I’m also struck by the parallels with private information “people finder” services that hoover up personal information without consent and have to be opted out of. One such service was the source of a recent data breach that exposed billions of Social Security numbers in the United States.
Yoshida’s post ends with a slightly ominous reminder that “third party tools” are against FF14’s terms of service, and that Square “will continue to take a firm stance against their usage.” I’m not an FF14 player myself, but I understand the use of benign third party QoL and UI plugins to be extremely widespread on PC. Hopefully Square will thread the needle and deal with problem actors like PlayerScope without innocent mods getting caught in the crossfire. Even in that case, though, I’d still be more mad at the shady stalker spyware developers over Square Enix.
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Kurt Indovina
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