Your actions still have, and ought to have, an effect on your privacy. It's definitely less than it should be, but it's something. Typically you have some idea about what you're signing up for, and having your information shared to a company because you joined a community is not one I'd typically expect myself.

You can affect your privacy though. If you choose to use free services and share a lot of information about yourself, that's a decision you make. Personally I choose to limit what I share about myself, and I reckon I'm quite aware of the consequences of my choices and how I could make other kinds of choices regarding my privacy. What's happening here goes against what I'd expect if I signed up to Reddit and joined a particular subreddit, which is exactly why I don't think this is acceptable.

If you're on Reddit, or Facebook, or any of those sites, your info's already out there. I mean yeah, it'd be nice if we could keep our details private online, but that's not the world we live in. I doubt anything Nintendo could expose in this investigation isn't already available for any corporation or government that wants to know.

Exactly. It's not about what we want or expect, companies will use your data as they see fit.

And it can go very far (2016 Trump election)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

And that's not an isolated incident. Advertising companies know you exactly. Everything you browse, look up, look at is measured and added to your 'profile' for customized adds in your customized feeds. All designed to keep your attention.

Other incidents I've had is ransomware or rather ransom threat emails that threatened to expose compromising pictures of me and to prove / get my attention it listed an old password I used back in the 90s, maybe collected from the PSN hack. So they had my user name linked to my email linked, linked to an old password.

Data breaches happen all the time, so next to companies selling your data, your data is also getting harvested.

Latest scams are targeting my parents in law, fake emails that they somehow link to my wife's email address as an alias. So at first glance it looks like my wife send it (click on the name and it shows the actual malicious email address) and of course contains a link with malware. My parents in law fell for it but luckily it was on a tablet that they clicked on the link. Seemed to have dodged a bullet there. Yet how were they able to mess with Google mail to insert a malicious email address linked to one of their email contacts to make it appear a trusted sender.

Yeah if you want you data safe, don't use the internet. Which isn't possible anymore nowadays since government data gets breached as well. Your info is online whether you want to or not.

At least Nintendo is asking, going through the legal process. Most don't :/

Well, it's a good thing I'm not on Reddit or Facebook, and do you want to know why? Hint: It's precisely because of what I've been preaching here. WhatsApp? Nope. Avoiding Disqus has been more bothersome, but I'm done that too for exactly the same reason. Just recently, I got VR equipment, and guess what criteria I used to exclude some pretty neat options? Yeah, privacy. Having a Google account is my greatest privacy issue, but it's a fairly controlled situation in many ways. Either way, I probably get more or less what I'm expecting, which would 100 % not be the case with this Reddit case. This is just disproportional, but it's what well in line with what Nintendo often (compared to many other similar companies) does: tight control, often using legal means. These days, I appreciate how Nintendo handles many things, but this is not such a thing.

I mean, what would be a proportional response? Nintendo depend on their IP for their very survival, as a result they're obviously going to defend them rigorously. Any info they can glean from this is most likely already out there, I don't see the harm.

Where did you get from that that they're going after 200k people? They're saying they want to go after the primary defendant and his associates. My guess is that it doesn't go beyond a dozen people.

Nintendo could probably find a way to request the information they need in a more limited fashion, but I would guess they're going for the this approach mostly because it's easier for them. The way I see it is that Nintendo is quite profitable even with the piracy around, and this is more about keeping things in control rather than meaningful loss of profits. Nintendo most certainly isn't fighting for its survival here. The chances are that Nintendo could do absolutely nothing, starting even from any copy protection measures in their consoles, to combat piracy and still be very profitable instead of having its survival threatened.

They're as successful as they are because they work to keep things under control. Why should they settle for having their property stolen? They have every right to combat piracy of their games.

With reason though? But I'm guessing we'll just have to disagree where the limits of 'within reason' are.

This was sarcasm btw. The law is supposed to protect everyone equally. If you have a problem with Nintendo going after 200,000 pirates of modern games you don't believe in the rule of law.