[Foundation-l] New draft of privacy policy

Tue Jun 17 00:19:14 UTC 2008

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 1:21 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 9:20 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I only asked why we give the equivalent checkuser on half our users to
>> the general public.   So far only Anthony has provided a reasonable
>> explanation.
>
> There is a much more obvious answer: nobody has written the code to do
> otherwise.  An IP is a fixed size which helps with storage, and the
> properties of IP numbering and re-use are well-known, allowing people
> to roughly guess when it is a different person on the same IP.
>
That pretty much *is* my answer.  Although, I think the main reason
nobody has written the code is that no one has been provided with a
spec which has any reasonable chance of being implemented.  Change
don't happen much 'round here.

> Rather than adding a layer on top of IP to hide the IP, it would be
> less revealing to automatically assign each new IP session with a
> cookie managed identifier, i.e. "Guest1234" (or a long random string
> that does not repeat, such as a GUID ) and then allow the user to
> rename this "guest account" when they finally learn how to.

Along those lines, I wonder how many people would be scared away from
editing if the "edit" link took them to the account creation page.
It'd be worth trying "as an experiment", if there were any mechanism
to actually perform such experiments.

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> We could easily implement it so that
> administrators automatically see IPs or can convert in one step, meaning
> issues of tracking and dealing with vandalism wouldn't apply.

I'm pretty sure if that were done one of the admins would leak a full
table of IP to hash matchups.  It'd only take one admin to send such a
table to Wikitruth or something and the whole hashing scheme would be
fairly useless.  Counterproductive, even, because it'd provide a false
sense of security.

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah... Forget it.  We won't come to an understanding.    ... At least I tried.

I quote Florence when I say, "Nod."