Is Blizzard allowed to scan RAM / CPU processes?

I tried to appeal my 6 months ban and the response contained: "The game client may monitor your computer's RAM and/or CPU processes for unauthorized third party programs running concurrently with the game." It goes without saying that they didn't appeal jack.

I was also wondering about the idea of blizzard using machine learning and statistical evaluation of player data to determine who's botting, because honestly if you think about it, just by analyzing the movement of a char you know with a high confidence that someone is botting. The only reason why I don't think they are doing this is because many of us got banned for botting in between normal sessions and they wouldn't have been able to gather conclusive data.. It must be something on the client side with the interface between WoW and HB which they updated in 7.1, as a friend of mine who hasn't botted since launch of 7.1 has yet to be banned...

 

who is going to stop them

 

This is the correct answer. It's not like blizz tells you they did it, and what are you going to do about it anyway?

 

this is like my friends (who dont play bot or even play wow) asking me if what i do is illegal

 

It was something that happened during 7.1 from the timeline. If you read their TOU you have agreed to them being able to scan your RAM since the game was launched in 2004.

 

botting is NOT illeagle, you are breaking no laws. You are going against Blizzards Terms Of Service only.

 

blizzard can permaban you because they don't feel like having you as a customer. they don't need a reason to ban you since you're technically just "buying in" to play on their game except you have no rights whatsoever. appealing wont do anything for you

 

signing the tos is much like inviting someone to enter your backyard.

no permission-illegal
permission-legal

 

Yes, in fact it even says it in the ban email:

 

not really.
ToS is not the law. If ToS will contain "all your base belong to us" that doesn't mean this is true.
In legal terms, there is a country/state law which is above any ToS.
If law will state clearly "botting is allowed" blizz would have to either stop banning or providing service for that country/state.

 

Not quite as cut and dry as you put it.

Basically, most countries treat the ToS/EULA as contracts - hence why you have to agree to them. Contracts themselves are legally enforceable agreements. By agreeing to them and accepting them you put yourself on the back foot legally speaking if you want to challenge their actions.
To further strengthen their own standing, Blizzard makes you agree to their locals laws in their location in the event none exist in your own country. In some cases there may be components of the ToS/EULA that are countered or trumped by local laws. In these cases Blizzard has a clause that allows for those sections to be disregarded whilst retaining the remaining content.

Now when it comes to issues of privacy and collection of data most places it is illegal to do without consent. But once you give it then you have opened to the door and enabled them to do so. So whilst you might have laws in your country that state they are not allowed to scan this or that if you give them permission to do so by agreeing to the ToS/EULA most courts will not penalise Blizzard if you try to claim otherwise. You not reading or understanding the content of either documents despite agreeing to them isn't an accepted legal defense in most cases.

The only time you could challenge this and be successful is if you could show that Blizzard have acted beyond the stated scope of the scan or taken data you haven't agreed to let them collect via the ToS/EULA.

 

stop these threads. they can scan whatever they need to. Online gaming in general would be impossible if you cant stop cheaters and hackers.

 

Most countries can treat ToS as contracts, but they still have their laws. If contract is against the law - its worth nothing. Even if it clearly states that you totally allow to ignore any laws with this country. Can you prove memory scan or can you not - its a different question. But clearly if country doesn't legally allow software spying - no EULA can make it legal. EULA is not a law. If Blizzard is to officially provide service in that country (and they are for EU and CIS on all territories, for example, not sure about other regions) - well, deal with it legally or stop it.

 

The right of this thread IMO: I want to make two points here, first off, there are some older threads discussing the idea that blizz doesn't scan your pc for third party softwares since that would be illegal, so this snippet from my appeal response seems to contradict that. Secondly, it is very easy to catch cheaters/hackers using only methods deployed on the server side, analyzing player data using statistics and machine learning, fairfight used in the battlefield games is one such incarnation. It is not intrusive and when paired with millions of data sets can be pretty accurate. Like I mentioned in my first post, analyzing player movement would probably already be enough since bots always take the same routes, don't rotate while turning (sharp angles), etc. which all differs from the vast majority of real human players.

 

WoW doesn't scan outside it's allocated memory scope. It's against the Law in many countries.

All the information that's publicly available on Warden is no longer valid. The only people who truly know what Warden is capable of are people who know enough to disassemble it and reverse engineer it at a very high level. In the past there was a group that had a program called the Governor which would be a sort of a Watchdog for Warden.


In the US for instance if Warden scanned RAM as a whole than Blizzard would be violating our Constitutional right to privacy under the Ninth Amendment. The Terms you agree to in WoW are very broad and just because they scan your CPU and RAM doesn't mean they have access to everything. Again they word it very broadly but it doesn't overcome that Laws that they follow.

The Right to Privacy and Blizzard Entertainment’s “The Warden”- LEGAL spyware? | Learning Constitutional Law

 

Not really. Warden has always remained roughly the same, a system to download and execute code. It has always had the client send you modules and then executed the modules code at blizzard's request.

The part that has changed is the tricks they use with warden, such as having inactive client code active other parts of warden, self-modifying code, spamming tons of modules frequently to the client to make it more annoying to analyze or shut down on any new module found, etc etc. There is no exact science to protecting a hack like honorbuddy as it is now, you just try your best and hope its good enough.

 

Yes it's in their TOS!
Look up their EULA, it's in XVI section #1

XVI. Acknowledgements. You hereby acknowledge that:

1.

 

Okay guys, let's fight against Blizzard's lawyers

 

Some of you are right and some are wrong first yes they say they dont scan outside the wow files but i have read personally that they scan everything in the memory not just wow files. I watched a video of a once bot creator monitor what warden was doing and what information it was collecting. Im sure if you google it you will find it. Blizz does put in there tos that you have to allow it or you dont play but what is wrong is that blizz is allowed to do this and no one has the money to fight against it. Yes blizz is violating our 9th amendment but as stated who has the millions to push for proof? what needs to happen is a software to block the scanning of the warden. Im not exspert but if you could come up with a way to either block it or move hb to a location not being scanned by warden then maybe we could live alittle longer but if not then we are going to be doing these threads every 6 months for the rest of HB's life.

 

Afaik they're not actually allowed to do it, I think they got nailed for doing it after the old Glider case. That being said, at some point in the last few years they've realized "Oh wait we're #%$&ing huge. Who's gonna stop us?", added the "The game client may monitor your computer's RAM and/or CPU processes for unauthorized third party programs running concurrently with the game." part to the TOS to halfway cover their ass, and started doing it again.