The problem is that it could be a slippery slope with no transparency, oversight, or recourse.
First, it's creepy that a company I paid money to for a game is actively scraping the internet trying to associate my Blizzard-Activision account/identity with other online identities. What if they get it wrong?
Second, there's nothing preventing them from taking action based on subjective aspects. What if the employee reviewing my "behavior" is racist and bans me because they figure out I'm black? Or because I posted a political video they didn't agree with and deemed "toxic"? What happens if a Blizzard employee decides to dox someone as a form of punishment?
There's no way they have enough properly trained and ethical support people to have any real checks and balances to prevent abuse.
Sure, initially I would hope (for their sake) that they're only considering in-game or game-related posts/content, but once these tools exist it's only a matter of time before they are abused, or they see how far they can push things until there's a financial backlash.
> The problem is that it could be a slippery slope with no transparency, oversight, or recourse.
There's actually a very simple recourse: don't pay them any more money or play the game. In this case, Blizzard is definitely more afraid of making their customers unhappy and turning off their funding, then the other way around.
Which is part of the reason why they have been very slow to act on some of this abusive behavior to begin with: players blame other players for abusive behavior, but they blame the company when they get banned.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. If bans start coming in for activity outside the game, it'll be a complete shit show (and rightly so), but if the info they collect is just another data point to strengthen/weaken the case of reports it might improve the system as a whole... time will tell I suppose.
The article also derails a bit as the author chimes in with his personal opinion. IMO they're approaching this the right way.