Originally Posted by
Sonol
How could I sum this up...
There is big daddy Blizz who provides gaming service.
There are irresponsible ppl who can easily expose their account information to a 3rd party, because these ppl don't use common sense and have no idea about security risks (illegal sites ask for account information, they share things on social media etc.)
Blizz has some additional services that makes THEIR work easier to recover lost/hacked accounts. According to these safety services of Blizz, you can install an app to your phone and/or give your phone number. They do it for the safety of the account, they don't have any plans with this data, yet you can't know for sure what additional data is used/sent to Blizz accessing to your phone via their app.
Now some hacker gets into Blizz database where data of ppl is stored. Not everything, but like your name, phone number, location, possible access to phones that have Blizz apps installed on them. This data is all stored at a big ass public company. So you only have to breach the security of this one company and you can get data of thousands of account owners. You can even get into their social media, because many use FB for log-in, even more data.
So you got all this data, it's called identity. A phone number, a name, a place of birth, an age etc. As a 3rd party, you can sell these identities or use them. It's up to them, but using real identites, even for just hours is very real, and it's not a spy movie.
I'm not naive, I know there are other ways to steal identities, but this can be one of them. So no, thanks, I don't expose my identity to the Internet even more. I won't make hackers' work easier, because it's more profitable to hack into one database and steal tons of data from one place than hack into individual accounts/computers one by one. Big companies are big targets to hit.