[mabbo]

World of Warcraft did something that I've always found delightful: hidden stenographic watermarking on all screenshots.

It took like a decade before anyone noticed, but all screenshots were very very very slightly modified to hide (in plain sight) a blob of data that gave the account name, date, time, server, etc.

Just in case a screenshot ever got posted and they really needed to know who took it and when.

[d110af5ccf]

> that I've always found delightful

Leaking user data to me is a betrayal of trust, incredibly distasteful, and probably borders on illegal (it ought to be imo). Note that this is fundamentally different than watermarking streaming content or other material that the user is not legally permitted to copy. Watermarking the game binaries themselves, for example, would be entirely different and perfectly acceptable from my perspective.

[FateOfNations]

While WoW didn't do this, one could avoid disclosing user data to third parties by encrypting the watermark payload.

[rany_]

This works until the encryption key is leaked.

[ironick09]

Do you have any resources/information you can share on this? I’d be curious to read more.

[lights0123]

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/zp8sg/tracking_persona...