Considering Retiring my Account

Costelus is clearly a blood sucking vampire.  Like Ray Brooks was, secretly.  We can sacrifice you to Costelus and I'll volunteer to take pictures, and then I can post them on my chess.com page and... yeah, WUUT!

I would imagine that if someone really wanted to find you, they wouldn't need chess.com to do it.

At least Ray Brooks was open about it! He even posted a picture of himself, fangs an' all.

There may also have been some blood in there, come to think of it, and he didn't get asked to remove his avatar. Is this double standards?

Yes, confirm - this does work (shows me now in Honolulu...). Oddly, the first time I viewed this interactive map I saw no member dots at all - not even my own. Must have been some server glitch.

Leaving the location field blank and using IP address, it shows me near my studio - which is @ a mile from my house. Creepy.

This is a not good feature Chess.com.

Could be, could be . . . I thought his profile picture was a dog, but look at those ears-- maybe that's him when he's in bat mode.  Can't those guys switch back and forth between human and bat form?

--Cystem 

OK now I must add my home town then.

And me my pub

I guess it takes a little time to update.

Now that everyone is putting in nonsense locations, it's going to mess up future plots on my map on my profile page.

I still don't understand why I can't see a marker for my own location, correctly or incorrectly located.

If chess.com really is displaying locations based on IP addresses, that is dodgy, and I really don't like that.

OK, before we get back to Transilvania and vampires :)

That interactive map displays the location of your internet provider. It isn't such a big deal, you are one out of at least 10,000 other users connected through that provider. In a big city with almost 2 million inhabitants, I think that's almost no privacy issue.

i honestly don't understand why this is such a big deal. we aren't showing IP addresses. we're showing ROUGH locations. you don't have to show your name, or anything about yourself. even if it locates you within 1,000 feet (which is HIGHLY unlikely - it's probably a 2 square mile radius), there are hundreds or thousands of people in that same radius, and unless you are walking around with a sign around your neck with your Chess.com username, how would someone recognize you?

i mean, let's take you. your name is "an_arbitrary_name". let's say i even knew which street you live on - what would i do with that? start knocking on doors asking for "an_arbitrary_name"?

i put my real name, my picture, and my city on here (i'm in mountain view). i'm one of the most visible people on the site. i've never felt like someone had the slightest chance of finding me through the map, of all places. 

perhaps what we do is only show you on the map if you have put in your location? then you can put in your city name and not be worries. we can not use IP address to find you. that's a reasonable suggestion. 

That's exactly what I would like!

I have to say that's a dissappointing aproach to privacy in such a crowded site. Users who leave their location info and country blank reveal their ISP location and in most cases without realizing it, and it doesn't have to be about a killer knocking on your door. it's just a piece of information you may not want to share with others.

I don't think the system is ideal when a random false location info works better than no info in sake of online anonymity.

+1.

Erik, it's a potentially big deal for at least one reason I can think of.  Some people, maybe even the OP here, are women and play from countries where intereacting with a man can be punished with horrible consequences.  I think you know what I'm talking about, right?  If a woman is naive enough or not experienced in the ways of the internet she may well be very easy to "track down", particularily if she's from a rural location.   The consequences for such a woman might be horrendous.  Why put anyone at risk in that way?  It seems to me alot of the "conflicts" we have here, be it about what kind of words are okay  or what kinds of images are ok are largely about cultural differences. 

It's extremely ethnocentric to hold the belief that no harm could possibly come to someone as a result of this feature, which virutallyl everyone agrees adds nothing of value to your website.  Not everyone accesses this site from big cities.  Some are accessing it from tiny towns and hamlets where there might only be a very small number people with web access.  Any of those people could be at grave risk in certain cultures. 

Yeah, this complete disregard for the personal privacy is dissapointing. I put in my hometown on the information, mainly because it's the second biggest town in Sweden, so I felt safe doing so. But with the help of the map you can narrow my place down to creepingly close to where I actually am.

Granted, this enough isn't enough to track me down, but the more information that chess.com willingly shares, the easier it becomes.

I've been tracked down and threatened by someone from the internet before, and while nothing happened, it wasn't pleasant.

I really hope something is done quickly about this.

Yes, but you can change/hide location there. You can change your location here either, but the main problem is that when you leave the location & country section blank, supposing you haven't disclosed any information on your location, but in reality that very concern for your privacy reveals your ISP location and most don't know about it. In playchess, it's obvious to the average user where they appear to be on the map.

Which is public, right?

Anyway, chess.com could let its users decide whether or not to be shown on that map. It's not a big deal to program this.