Punyelf has described the BNet connections, but you have to opt-in to each of those explicitly anyhow. I wonder whether there are any other linkages depending on it.
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Do you know if any addons do the same? I was thinking, I do have TRP3 installed on some characters I have lurking on Defias Brotherhood etc
I have no experience with that addon myself so I would not be able to comment. Someone here might know more or you could ask the addon creator. Or try their discord
No, addons as such don’t use the BNET API.
However, certain specific addons you might install that are written to work with these sites can upload data about your activity, like the Raider.io client or the Wowhead client.
You can also check what sites you’ve linked in to in account settings under connections
https://account.blizzard.com/connections#authorized-applications
Well, I’ve disabled mine. I never linked my BNet to any external sites anyhow, so no loss there, and if it does include some other data sharing, I certainly won’t miss that.
There are a lot of legitimate concerns regarding privacy and data on the internet these days.
Someone knowing the name of your WoW alts is not one of them.
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That’s so weird… I don’t know what was going through his mind when asking about your alts
I don’t see raiderio being problem. If you ban it because people can buy boosts, then you also should ban achievements, item levels & make every info about character private. I don’t see that making game anything better. And when we talk about raiding, it should be mainly for guild activity and lets be real. If you are boosted, you will get caught anyway in guild raid.
I am surprised how the only conclusion people came to is that the GM in question was some kind of sicko.
There is a multitude of reason of having an alt in another guild could be a red flag for recruitment.
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Has not mentioned they were part of this guild previously so inquiry into why they’d look for a new one to raid with. The intention being the recruitee may be hiding a potential issue with the previous guild.
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Other guild is raiding as well, and the question has to be asked, is the recruit gonna be commiting to the 3 days with the guild or splitting their time between the characters and both guilds.
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The final one is why most employ background checks for recruiting, are they just a leech? Sending an alt to lower tier guilds to get geared and then ditch them to join their main guild. In this case while the alt in said guild was inactive as you said, they still had been a member of it for a relatively long time, and that likely raised some red flags.
That being said, most recruiters will extensively look you up and identify your past guild affiliations and what not. The difference between that guy and your average GMs is that he actually was open about it.
And to cut ahead of comments saying that that wouldn’t matter to a casual Heroic guild, it doesn’t matter what content they do. As long as the guild is meant to work together it ruins morale and makes everyone in it feel uneasy when a GM lets their guild be treated as a revolving door by leeches and hoppers.
On the privacy side, they’d have to completely break anything that overlaps between multiple characters, be it mount collection, pet collection, achievements, post count etc. If people would get their wish where nearly everything was account wide, everything would have to be broken. Certain addons would also worsen game performance and grow in size when they have no access to certain API functions currently shared. And if it becomes optional to share those account wide informations between characters, unless the vast majority opts into it, some new site will identify potential alts based on individual characteristics shared by sharing disabled accounts.
Maybe not for you, don’t comment if you don’t agree this isn’t an opinion piece, it’s a question 
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You dodged a bullet. That “casual” raiding guild should not be holding interviews.
You interview for guilds like Limit and Method who tend to scout you out anyway. Everyone else is just being tryhard.
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I am in a guild on my horde main alt and I had to apply because the GM wanted to know more about me to see if i was a right fit.
For some a casual guild may not be what they are looking for, for some casual means doing low level mythics and some pvp etc and for others it simply means logging in doing what you want and logging off.
I am glad the guild master of the guild took the time to contact me and we had a good chat and I met the other guild officers and was given a list of their sites etc.
The result is I am still in the guild a year later and enjoying it, so at times an interview is not a bad thing.
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If they know your battle.net login they can also get your alt names as soon as you log in. For example my horde main alt guild master can see my alliance alts and I can see his alts when he logs in.
i agree like this is disturbing. why do blizzard allow third party sites to get access to your character information, alts and real name? this is defently a invasion of privacy.
It’s not really private information as such. No personal data is given out as that is only something about you personally in real life. It’s data from a game.
I do appreciate some want to be private and although individuals can request to have their profiles hidden, or alts, they have to know what websites exist in order to register with them to make that happen.
It’s not unusual for any guild, serious or casual to have a chat with prospective members. Not all guilds do it but many do. I’ve never been asked about alts myself but none of mine are hidden either. If someone wants to bore themselves looking at my 47 characters, then more fool them 
Edit - correct typo
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Yeah and an alt is such a huge secret worth keeping.
It’s not, you misunderstand the post.
I’ve been playing since late Vanilla, and for me it was very jarring to have someone say to me “So, your character Leliana2, what do you use her for and what’s her current guild like?” Unprompted, fully aware of all my alts when this was my first interaction with them. I’ve never experienced it before.
Okay, I understand but what upsets you there? First time someone told me about my alt was when they wanted to use it as counter argument to my thinking/statement. It pissed me off because I know that my intent is far more greater and better and beneficial for everyone and it’s used as to counter my statement as it was something negative.
As I grew up, I learned that people who have low self esteem and basically clueless will always do this and boy, there are a lot of those people and best cure is - troll them as hard as you can.
I think most people don’t react kindly to that kind of snooping.