We are constantly improving our safety measures and bringing more systems and tools in place that empower players to respectfully interact with one another - because everyone deserves a place to comfortably be themselves online, free from harassment and bullying. One of the most common questions we get from players through feedback, posts, and appeals is how repeated enforcements impact their gameplay, how they escalate, what they escalate to, and how they know when their account is back in good standing. To help address this, we are introducing a new enforcement strike system.

The new system attaches strikes to every enforcement, ranging in severity based on inappropriate activity. Each player will now have a view of their enforcement history including strikes and the overall impact these have on their player record. This revised system gives players a better understanding of enforcement severity and the cumulative effect of multiple enforcements. Enforcement transparency is about giving players clarity into how their behavior impacts their experience. Our content moderation efforts are not changing as a result of the new enforcement strike system.

Genesis Market, an online-fraud-facilitation website and marketplace, has today been closed by an international joint effort coordinated by various police forces. Law enforcement agencies around the world took part in synchronized raids, including at locations in the UK and USA. 208 searches have been carried out, beginning at dawn on Tuesday 4 April, and a total of 119 suspected individuals have been arrested. This operation was spearheaded by the FBI in the US and the Dutch National Police. Consequently, users of the genesis.market website have been greeted with a boastful message and infographic on the home and login pages: "Operation Cookie Monster. This website has been seized."

Sophos, a leading software and hardware security vendor, has previously identified genesis.market as: "an invitation-only marketplace" from which buyers can acquire stolen credentials, cookies, and digital fingerprints that are gathered from compromised systems." According to the company's research, the illegal marketplace was also identified as an Initial Access Broker (IAB) - a business that compromises systems and services, steals data, and sells it. Genesis Market has special engagement capabilities in the field of illegally acquiring "credentials, cookies, and digital fingerprints". This stolen data was often sold on under individual lots, but the site also offered a longer term supply of data packages via a subscription service. This would offer the customer an up-to-date information trail, be it the tracking of an individual person or a collective.

Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Julie Brill in a blog post this Monday shared her - and Microsoft's - thoughts on regulation and its relationship to the tech sector. Julie Brill commented on the GDPR implementation originating in Europe, and how that could and should serve as a de facto standard of regulation that forces companies to steer away from the self-accountability on which they have remained for so long - and on which, paraphrasing Apple's own Tim Cook, "There are now too many examples where the no rails have resulted in great damage to society."

Microsoft feels that if left to self-regulation, companies won't do as mucha s they could in the pursuit of privacy and their consumers' rights as they would with a strong enforcement regime being planned and implemented at the governmental level. Of course, I think most of us agree with this at a fundamental level. However, there should also exist some defensive measures around the design and implementation of such governmental measures, such as, for one, no interference from corporations in the regulatory process. These should only serve as consultants, to prevent any ideas of bending the regulations in their behalf, and a pervasive strategy that accounts for both small businesses and huge corporation should also be key. We should remember that while the likes of Microsoft Apple, for example, should have relative ease in updating their practices and implementing regulation-required systems, other, smaller players could either live or die in their capability to quickly adapt to the new requirements. Snuffing out competition to the big companies by enforcing heavy penalties might not be the best road. What do you think? More regulation or self-regulation?