They're not doing it with malign interest in individual steamy adolescent e-romances or to track guild drama. More likely heuristics and metadata analysis by software they wrote to munge through the data.

People are very quick to cry that their privacy is being invaded without reading the EULA. Its like posting your revolutionary manifesto on facebook and being surprised when you don't get hired by the government.

To look at the positive... It is good that MMOs as an medium for social aggregation and expression are being considered seriously. Perhaps the research will yield interesting results.