We need to anonymize both IP addresses and proxy information with a secure
hash if we want to keep each GET request's geolocation, to be compliant with the Privacy Policy. Maybe this is not clear, raw IPS are not kept once geolocalization is done. IPs are discarded and geolocation info is the one kept long term.
The Privacy Policy is the most prominent policy on the far left on the
footer of every page served by
every editable project, and says explicitly that consent is required for
the use of geolocation. The privacy policy talks about client side geo location to offer you geo-specific features on the client side, which is an entirely different topic of what we are taking about here. IP addresses are going to be sent via HTTP regardless with your request and the geo location we do (to be able to report for example pages per country, one of the reports most sought after by our community) has nothing to do with geolocated features.
Do we have any privacy experts on staff who can give these issues a
thorough analysis in light of all the issues raised in https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 ? Anonymization is hard but thus far none is mentioned doing that, right? When it comes to IP data, again, we do not kept it long term neither do we anonymize it with any illusion of privacy, we just discard it as soon as we can. You can read on our research regrading anonymization here. This gist of it is that doing it well is quite hard. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data/Pageview_hourly/K_Anonymi...
If Ops needs IP addresses, they should be able to use synthetic POST
requests, as far as I can tell. If they anticipate a need for non-anonymous GET requests, then perhaps some >kind of a debugging switch which could be used on a short term basis where an IP range or mask could be entered to allow matching addresses to log non-anonymously before >expiring in an hour would solve any anticipated need? You can bring that up with ops team, I doubt we can operate a website for hundreds off millions of devices (almost a billion) and troubleshoot networking issues, DOS and others without having access to raw IPs for a short period of time. Ops work doesn't need to have access to IP data long term, just near term.
On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 7:11 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Pine wrote:
I tend to think that checkusers will need the plain IP addresses....
I am not suggesting removing the IP addresses or proxy information from POST requests as checkuser requires.
We need to anonymize both IP addresses and proxy information with a secure hash if we want to keep each GET request's geolocation, to be compliant with the Privacy Policy. The Privacy Policy is the most prominent policy on the far left on the footer of every page served by every editable project, and says explicitly that consent is required for the use of geolocation. The Privacy and other policies make it clear that POST requests and Visual Editor submissions aren't going to be anonymized.
However, geolocations for POST edit and visual editor submissions still require explicit consent which we have no way to obtain at present. Editors' geolocations as they edit are very useful for research, but by the same token have the most serious privacy concerns. Obtaining consent to store geolocation seems like it would interfere with, complicate, and disrupt editing. If geolocation is stored with anonymized IP addresses for GETs but not POSTs or Visual Editor submissions, both could easily be recovered because of simultaneously interleaved GET and POST requests for the same article are unavoidable.
Do we have any privacy experts on staff who can give these issues a thorough analysis in light of all the issues raised in https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 ?
If Ops needs IP addresses, they should be able to use synthetic POST requests, as far as I can tell. If they anticipate a need for non-anonymous GET requests, then perhaps some kind of a debugging switch which could be used on a short term basis where an IP range or mask could be entered to allow matching addresses to log non-anonymously before expiring in an hour would solve any anticipated need?
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