It gets better. The wedding was at a prison. And they didn’t just send me one invitation. They sent an entire run of 75.
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“Are you classified as a roleplayer?”
“Negative, I am a meat popsicle!”
Were they hoping you’d get a squad and break them out?
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Obviously. Lol.
This sounds different then what I originally assumed from OOP. So I might have read differently and erroneously into it then they intended.
I was going by the assumption the OOP was worried about real life info or wanting to be known “IRL” online.
Any type of Google form that I’ve seen doesn’t reveal personal info except maybe your Email address to one person.
There’s a vast difference between signing a Google form and trying to squeak out real life information from a Google doc.
And like, a consent form is fine and I don’t view it as invasive since Google outright tells you the form host will see that email address.
If all it was was a Google form, then that seems fine (I also had no knowledge of any 18 plus event so I have no real horse in this race)
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It gets worse. Geo investigation is so thorough now some enterprising individuals are able to guess accurate locations from photos with surroundings visible.
There was an article a few years ago about a woman whose city was revealed by the skyscrapers and photo angle in her background.
It’s a nice cautionary tale to recite about being careful what photos you post in public spaces online.
I’m gonna dive into this real quick.
- Do not post faces online. Especially not tied to names, places, locations, or with specific markings like tattoos, birthmarks, or similar. It is ridiculously easy to find somebody if you have their face, location and a ‘distinguishing’ marker like a tattoo or a specific vehicle, unique decoration or pet with scraping tools, especially if you have a large footprint in social media.
We run a scraping tool on a computer that does nothing else but figuring out if people we’re about to let in to the Support Group have been totally honest with us about criminal history/partner-dependant situations/other matters, and if you’re heavily active on social media, like to take selfies, and can’t shut up about your personal life? Its a matter of hours for the system to narrow down who you are, what you get up to and then we can identify other ‘issues’ such as criminal history, your general location on any given day based upon posting times and key words and phrases in those posts. We ran it on one of the group’s core members for a lark and for a test, and with two hours and change, with access to her facebook and her name, and a single photo of her car and her face, it narrowed down where she was in the state, and the local district, the average time she’d be at work and at home seven days a week, where she lived based upon government records via her name, face and vehicle registration and the stores and shopping centres she visited regularly based upon her post history, her google reviews and her selfies.
It was sobering to realise just how easily somebody could get your location, routine and other details with just a bunch of scripts running on a PC.
You run these scripts along with geo-locators and just general public access to government systems requesting information on criminal records, public reviews, social media and other online material, you can find somebody stupidly easy. From there, you can gain access to their mailbox, and can then have physical media which might allow you to pass yourself off as a co-renter/inhabitant of the house/guest of the owner, and you have the ability to access even more information, especially if the person on the other end of the line feeding you information is terminally stupid or thinks consequences are for other people.
We are not safe.
- Inform your employer, in writing and email for records, that you do not permit them to inform the general public of your shift hours or days without informing you first of the request. It is distressingly easy for people to figure out when and how often you’re at work with just a little bit of digging, and the last thing you need to be is jumped in the car-park or have somebody waiting for you inside the house because Herp-a-Derp from the Front Desk can’t keep their damn mouth shut.
Let me run this by you. You have a jealous Ex. Jealous Ex who you don’t want anything to do with. Jealous Ex who likes to throw shade because nothing is ever their fault, it is yours, it was always your fault things went wrong, never theirs…
They know you have a dog from your social media, or from when they were together with you.
They want to know where you are now living.
Ring up the front desk and say “Hey, I found X’s dog, but there’s no collar, can you give me their address so I can drop off their animal? What time are they likely to leave work, my phone is almost out of battery, but I should be able to drop off the animal later today.”
Herp-a-Derp rattles off the information, thinks they’ve done a good deed, smiles to themselves and goes back to shuffling papers. Jealous Ex now knows where you live again, and can lie in wait for you and start stalking you again, if not worse.
And you have no idea, or even worse, Herp-a-Derp, eager to tell everybody what a good person they are, tells you your beloved pet escaped and somebody will be coming over to deliver it shortly after you leave work. You rush home in a panic, only to see Jealous Ex standing there, glowering at you, and that horrific realisation they have found you once again.
Any and all messages involving questioning the location and other information of a staff member are not to be answered on the spot, you get the caller’s information, you tell them you’ll pass the message on, you get a name and you tell the employee in question everything. Treat every message as if you will have to stand up in court and testify over it, because people are freaks and have a rapidly-fading grasp of consequences for their actions.
Don’t just turn off cameras on your computers or other electronic devices, cover that 
with blue-tax and other solid, gummy materials until you need to use them as if somebody has access to your system, they can turn these things on.
Never get Alexa, Siri or other ‘Intelligent’ systems, they are riddled with back-door access loopholes and unless you’re really up on the tech, odds are you’ll miss most of them.
If your house is open when you get home and you normally lock it up tight, just leave the door open and go for a lap of the block in your car, as loudly and noisily as possible. Give them a chance to get out, and if you go back in, ring a friend and tell them that if you don’t call back in 10 minutes, be prepared to call the cops. We’ve had people go home and the Ex has broken in and was waiting for them with a meat cleaver because he wasn’t allowed to find anyone else, he wasn’t supposed to have a happily ever after and it took three cops and two taserings to get this strung-out ghoul to go down and drop the weapon.
You are not safe just because you’re a guy, or you’re strong, or you have a gun. You leave that to people who are trained to this 
and you don’t put yourself in harm’s way.
If you have an ex who is tech savvy and they’re being cruel and malicious about the break-up, run a face-search for yourself on prawn-sites afterwards. Check your computer for unexplained USB drives, additional ‘attachments’ to your keyboard or mouse cables, and run a search on your computer for programs, look for programs you don’t know or recognise, especially key-loggers. Get help setting up an entirely new account and removing their old account off your system entirely.
We’ve had two women who had partners who were tracking them online, basically able to follow their purchases, track their messages and one had even used his old account to remotely log in, use the speakers to talk to her Alexa, and basically give himself access to her security system, including cameras, to continue to stalk her and see who she was letting into her unit, because she hadn’t set up Alexa to only respond to her voice, and he had all the information he required because she’d left everything in word documents on the computer he had remote access to.
Both of them were able to get off with just warnings and extensions to their restraining orders because, technically, they still had legal access to the computers, the partners simply had never removed them and it was a legal grey area, even if it was blatantly harassment and stalking.
The law is an 's 
and is designed to protect property, not people.
You’d change the locks after kicking out somebody, removing their ability to interact with your electronic and online systems is no different. Over the 30+ years I’ve been a part of this Support Group, I have seen horrors from partners and Ex-partners who think they’re being slick and can’t be touched, we’ve had people try to snatch their spawnlings despite court orders keeping them away, we’ve had people try to take said spawnlings overseas, because they could stalk and track people online, get enough details to pass themselves off as the individual online, and then try to leave the country to their homeland where a woman or a non-believer has no rights and our country does not have an extradition treaty with them.
I could go on, but this is a PG forum and this was only meant to be a short rant…
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Of course if I had a burner phone linked to burner gmail, I could just use that. But the age would not reflect me IRL. When I played WoW in 2012, I did have those but since got married so having a burner phone is not exactly appropriate for me. Issues aside now, when something like this pops up, just log over to MG.
Did they prank you or had intent to stalk?
No idea. They never made it to my house that I know of. No one ever hinted that it was them that did it. There was no follow up. It was just odd. It made me hyper aware of my surroundings in a way I had never been in the past, and I still look out before I go outside because of it.
It’s likely a scraper software was used to locate you outside of the game. Because there was not follow-up of any kind, likely to just be a prank.