the new privacy policy, really goes agains the
wishes of the community as
they do not wish to be finger printed.
I don't think that "the wishes of the community" have been established and
the whole point of checkuser is that it allows for fingerprinting.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 4:20 AM, Nuria Ruiz <nuria(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
As a checkuser, user agents are an important part
of my workflow for
identifying that multiple accounts are owned by the same
person.
So I'm going to have to argue for including
more information in the
user agent.
Including more information on the UA, while being covered by legal
under the new privacy policy, really goes agains the wishes of the
community as they do not wish to be finger printed.
See:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:EventLogging/UserAgentSanitizationor
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Privacy_policy
There has been plenty more discussions about this on analytics e-mail
list.
Your proposed user agent would basically mean that
every single person
using the most up-to-date version of the app on a particular
platform would
be indistinguishable from each other. This would,
unfortunately, lead to
lots of innocent users getting blocked as sockpuppets.
However, note that the UA " WikipediaApp/<version>
<OS>/<form-factor>/<version>" clearly satisfies the use case of
the mobile
team. It provides as much information as they need from their user without
sending any private data.
Can you please list what is your use case? Namely how are you identifying
"false" accounts. Perhaps relying on the user agent to do so is not the
best strategy going forward. Have in mind that with the old privacy policy
UA data needed to be discarded after 90 days. With the new policy there is
more legal room but given community feedback analytics team is planning
on aggregating all UA information in the future. This means that UA data
will not be stored (or reported) per user or request but rather agreggated
(as in "4% of users use iPhone").
We gathered recently information from all teams as to use cases
pertaining UA data collection:
https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Internal/EventLogging/PrivateDa…
.
Let's talk about your use case and add it to the document that already
exists describing usages of user agent data, this document was sent out to
all teams couple months ago but there is no description of your use case
there:
https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/document/d/1bp6qrvYi0Mh7l0s1psGnXEE…
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:20 PM, Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hey Yuvi,
As a checkuser, user agents are an important part of my workflow for
identifying that multiple accounts are owned by the same person. So I'm
going to have to argue for including more information in the user agent.
Your proposed user agent would basically mean that every single person
using the most up-to-date version of the app on a particular platform would
be indistinguishable from each other. This would, unfortunately, lead to
lots of innocent users getting blocked as sockpuppets.
Here's an example of a user agent from an iPhone using Safari:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; zh-tw)
AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4
Safari/6533.18.5
Look at all of that wonderful information! ;-) In general, the more
information you can include without breaching the user's privacy, the
better.
I'd be happy to work with you on this.
Thanks,
Dan
P.S. You may also want to consult with the legal team, to ensure that an
unacceptable levels of private information are not given out. They would
also make a complement for me; I would likely be pulling in the direction
of "MOAR INFORMATION!", whereas they would likely be pulling in the
direction of "LESS INFORMATION!". :-)
On 26 March 2014 15:00, Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Add Analytics to cc, as I think they'll be
interested as well :)
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello!
>
> We are getting closer to a general release of the Wikipedia Android
> and iOS apps, and I think we should standardize on a User-Agent
> format. The old app just appended an identifier in front of the
> phone's default UA[1] but I think we can do better, to avoid privacy
> concerns[2].
>
> How about:
>
> WikipediaApp/<version> <OS>/<form-factor>/<version>
>
> This gives us all the info we need (App version, OS, Form Factor
> (Tablet / Phone) and OS version) without giving away too much. It is
> also fairly simple to construct and parse.
>
> For the latest alpha, my Nexus 4 would generate
>
> WikipediaApp/32 Android/Phone/4.4
>
> While an iOS device might generate
>
> WkipediaApp/2.0 iOS/Phone/7.1
>
> form-factor would just be Phone|Tablet for now, and can be expanded
> later if necessary.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> [1]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile/User_agents#Apps
> [2]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EventLogging/UserAgentSanitization
> --
> Yuvi Panda T
>
http://yuvi.in/blog
--
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog
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