PSA: How to have better control over your privacy in-game

Community General Discussion
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Throughout the years there have been numerous websites that track your alts, track your achievements and basically nearly every detail on your account - they do this because when you sign up to play Blizzard games, in the small print you accept that Blizzard TOS may share some of your game data - but never your real life details. After seeing a few posts throughout the years asking “how come someone can track my alts”, I decided this post might be helpful to some :slight_smile:

These websites can be handy for those who want to check your gameplay history, for example, raiding, logs of your characters’ performances, and other genuine reasons why someone may want this data.

However, not everyone uses these websites to track data for that reason - instead, they track your characters to harass you in game or on forums.

Hiding your achievements? Nope. These websites will still be able to track your characters and data. Changing your character name? Nope. These websites update the data so your new character name is shown. Create a new toon? Again, these websites will list all your alts for those with malicious purposes.

The solution?

You don’t need to sign up to these websites to check that “Stop tracking my alts” button, the option is in right in your Blizzard account. What many players don’t know hidden away in their account is a little setting that will stop ANY of these tracking websites from doing just that. This tells Blizzard and 3rd party websites you don’t want any of your data shared. Hurray!

Here’s how:

Log into your account.

Account settings.

Scroll to “Privacy and Communication”.

Scroll down to an option called " GAME DATA AND PROFILE PRIVACY" and under this, you will want to disable this option.

A word of warning that if you use logging websites that track your DPS/HPS in raiding, this WILL break these websites being able to get that data. On the other hand, pesky tracking websites are now blocked from tracking your alts - all of them :slight_smile:

Other few privacy tips after doing this is to set in-game social settings to only displaying individual character achievements.

Hope this helps some folk out there who want to talk advantage of an extra layer of privacy in-game and on forums.

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I genuinely do not understand why people care who can see their alts.

Anyone can look me up on wowprogress, raider io, check pvp etc etc and what does this tell them? That there are other pixels that I play. I’ve frequently shared my Paladin addiction showing all my chars on my account. Many show my Battle tag, which is of little use to them as I don’t tend to accept random requests.

You can go to most sites, register and opt out of being linked to your alts. If there is something specific that you want to hide from.

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people usually tend to Harrass people on multiple alts, i saw a thread on the AD forums that talked about 1 of these instances, here’s the link

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I don’t understand either but it is nice to have the options for those who do care to use.

The post about the harassing is a bit edge case but it does happen so it is good to have it.

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same…since i many times stated i run a one person guild it´s just to look up my guild to see my alts… and im fine with ppl doing that :smiley:

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Not everyone is like you though. Not everyone wants everyone who isn’t their friend to know who their alts are. They do not need to give reasons or satisfy anyone as to why they may want to do so. It is a personal choice of privacy. I know for sure when I sign up to something, I want to take privacy seriously. The only people who I want to know my account like I do is the official staff at Blizzard Entertainment.

In by doing so you’re surrendering more of your data by linking your battle.net account to them. It’s best to just to tell Blizzard not to share your data with 3rd parties and that completely disables them.

EDIT: just to add, in all them websites this “MVP” listed - doing this will disable all of these being able to even log your character not alone track it or your alts. :slight_smile:

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My alts are all in a guild called Puny Inc, one on Horde one on Alliance :rofl:

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i have only 1 guild on ally and i plan on making 1 for my horde chars.
it’s called in italian “Gran’s Heritage” since most of my characters start with “Gran”.
Exept this fella i use on forums and a few ones.

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There is no need to get snarky with the the this “MVP”. Most sites require you to identify what your alts are, most commonly they will pull it from your bnet.

Some sites can see more info without that but things like Raider IO the point is that people want to link them so that their mains show on their alts score etc.

It is fine for you to want to hide every little thing but I generally don’t think it’s advisable. Personal data yes, totally protect all of that, pixels, not so much.

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My, my, you really do seem to have an invested interest in knowing people’s alts. I totally disagree with your POV, however, and I would advise people to think carefully about their privacy - even over pixels online as everything you do online, is in fact, pixels. Common sense.

As pointed out by several posters in this thread, there are valid reasons for hiding your account information which includes stopping people who may have malicious intent finding out your alts. Even if there is no malicious intent, I’m still very happy I have this option to stop people who aren’t my friends knowing every last little detail I do or character(s) I play - yes, even with my pixels. I’m satisfied with that.

Again, with respect, no one needs to give you (or anyone without proper authority) a reason why they want to do that - hide their alts or account information - privacy of any level is at a person’s discretion - as I’m sure Blizzard didn’t introduce the option for no reason.

I have to say as you have been given a position of a poster who posts “valuable” information, I don’t think you’re doing yourself justice trying to obtrude your stance on how you feel you generally don’t advise on good privacy [apparently?]. I think most people would disagree with that.

That pretty much covers everything I have to say to you at this point. For all others who are interested in having better privacy, including controlling what 3rd party websites have access to your account information - please check out my original post.

Have a wonderful day and enjoy people not being able to track your characters if you so desire :slight_smile:

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Mine was already off

Share Game Data

Battle.net allows external developers to build applications and experiences for our players using game data. Unless you turn this share off, some information associated with your Battle.net account, such as gameplay data and your BattleTag, may be shared with external developers.

Yeah no thanks

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Some people have genuine privacy concerns.

Most people that do it are douches hiding the characters they are douches on, or people misrepresenting themselves in some way (I used to raid world first don’t cha know!).

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Okay I can see the attitude is going to stay, so be it. I’ll be the bigger person ignore the using my MVP status as a beating stick and the snarky attitude.

Of course I don’t have a vested interest in knowing people’s alts. At no point have I said that. Lots of useful third party websites need to be able to pull information from your account and if you cut that off you can no longer make use of those sites.

That is why I don’t advocate using it. In general it is not a good idea. It is better to control the data on specific site rather than removing yourself from everything. So if you particularly want to hide your alts, then just hide your alts, don’t cut yourself off from all the rest.

If someone is being harassed first and foremost report it. Most things can be reported in game, with right click and report player. When you report someone it also blocks them. If that person circumvents the block to continue to contact you then you can raise a ticket to get a GM involved.

I’m not immune to being targeted, I was sexually harassed by a player and they circumvented my report auto block, Blizzard dealt with it and they have never tried again. I believe they got a time out from being able to play. I also get people from the forums track me down in game, some of them I’ve become great friends with, others just want to complain about something I’ve said and one even had a rant how I didn’t reply to them personally in a long discussion topic. I could go on but you get the idea.

Everyone should protect their actual personal data. With this I mean your address, phone number, log in details etc.

There is nothing wrong with you wanting to use those settings, there are others here who do that. Some are surprised that the API data is still picked up by some sites despite ticking that option. So depending on what information you feel is sensitive, it may not be covering everything you want it to.

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Sometimes you might agitate individuals that will track you to the ends of the earth…

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From my experience, it’s mostly for malicious reasons, so that they can make up whatever claims they want about themselves without anyone being able to verify, or to harass people on a character that isn’t linked to their main to avoid any confrontation with consequences.

While I absolutely don’t deny that harassment happens and that extreme cases where people get harassed across alts are real, I do not believe those cases are nearly as frequent as those where the one hiding their characters is the malicious party.

People love being jerks if they can stay anonymous, while genuine people generally don’t have the need for that level of anonymity, of course unless they are at the receiving end of extreme harassment. But again, I believe those cases are rare.

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Chances are that a person who doesn’t like a website tracking and sharing their character data also don’t visit or need those websites to begin with. For example I can’t think of any website that should have any data about my alts or what I do in the game. And before you say Rio, WoW progress, warcraftlogs etc. I don’t do M+ or raids so all of those are irrelevant to me.

For people like me it would be much easier to just use the privacy option offered by Blizzard instead of trying to track down all the websites (I’m sure there are several I’m not even aware of), create accounts and block them from tracking me.

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