So I was a bit upset about Real ID on the forums, back in July. I’m still not particularly pleased with the in-game functions either, although I do carefully make use of them. Today I’ve noticed a change. Pointed out on twitter by @NDMiko, the change enables users to hide themselves from friends of friends.

As you can see from the image above, under ‘Settings’ in your battle.net account there is now a simple toggle for enabling Real ID. Like facebook are wont to do with their privacy settings, the Real ID system is toggled on by default. Not so good. There are also two other settings that will allow the cautious to hide themselves from friends of friends, making the Real ID feature more useable for those of us who wish to maintain privacy for whatever reason.

My only quibble is that by default you are still going to show up on Facebook Friends lists and Friends of Friends lists. You have to actively opt out of both these services, at the very least the Facebook one should be off by default. I also wish that some sort of notification was available in-game to let people know that these features are now live. They may have been out for a while now, but I certainly had not noticed them until now.

Those players who until how have had to use Child Controls to disable the system will now simply be able to switch it off with ease. Very good news. More news like this, Blizz.