New subject: Mobile and CheckUser (Was [mobile-l][Analytics] Wikipedia App User Agents)

27 Mar 2014

Forking since I think there are two conversations - one about the
format of UA for the mobile apps and one about CheckUser requirements
for anything that does edits. Having them separate would be useful.

For those who do not know what CheckUser means, I recommend reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser.

IP address and UA are amongst the two most important pieces of info
CUs have in helping prevent abuse. IP is already sortof useless with
mobile networks - a lot of providers do NAT and similar things that
mean that we can not remotely close to reasonably assume 1 IP = 1
User, or anything remotely similar to that. UA provides more
fingerprinting ability, but CU isn't the only thing that consumes UA -
other parts of the infrastructure do as well.

So what we need, is a way to preserve the ability to fingerprint only
users making edits (no read actions!) for CU. I am sure that can be
implemented without having to have a very fingerprintable UA, with
simple hooks on both the App's side and on Extension:CheckUser.

We could generate a simple fingerprint that's unique per device (and
disconnected completely from every other device identifier) that we
send only with edits (and other 'POST' actions) as a separate header.
This can be processed by CU (perhaps with a hook that
Extension:MobileApp can hook into) and then used by CheckUsers. This
data will be treated with the same data retention / privacy policy
that applies to CUs now, and regular UA data can be consumed by other
consumers without too much fingerprinting concerns.

I talked to hoo and he said the CU hook shouldn't be too much of a
problem, and the app side of the issue is rather simple too. Deskana
(speaking solely as a volunteer CU) says that this solution is
acceptable to him. Thoughts other people?

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 10:43 PM, Oliver Keyes &lt;okeyes(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:
...
  Repost, because filtering; there might be a point of
confusion here that's
 causing the problem. As I understand it, the user agent sanitisation is
 expected to apply to EventLogging data, and data in the Analytics pipeline,
 but not data streaming into MediaWiki proper - namely, the cu_changes table.
 Nuria, is that the case?

 On 27 March 2014 08:16, Nuria Ruiz &lt;nuria(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

 Rather than having an ethical debate over it, we
could always test the
 actual usefulness with Science. That way we'd be able to see how much
 granularity each additional component adds to the data.  I kind of feel we are
going backwards as we throughly discussed this
 point, technical info and references regarding entropy and user agents and
 fingerprinting can be found here:
 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EventLogging/UserAgentSanitization

 On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 3:49 PM, Oliver Keyes &lt;okeyes(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
 wrote:

 +1. I'm totally down for keeping less information around, but if it gets
 in the way of people doing their job?

 Rather than having an ethical debate over it, we could always test the
 actual usefulness with Science. That way we'd be able to see how much
 granularity each additional component adds to the data.

 On 27 March 2014 07:15, Aaron Halfaker &lt;ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:
 >
> 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.

 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 &lt;nuria(a)wikimedia.org&gt; 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/UserAgentSanitization or
> 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 &lt;dgarry(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
> 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 &lt;yuvipanda(a)gmail.com&gt; 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 &lt;yuvipanda(a)gmail.com&gt;
>>> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Analytics mailing list
>>> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dan Garry
>> Associate Product Manager for Platform
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
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>
>
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 --
 Oliver Keyes
 Research Analyst
 Wikimedia Foundation

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 --
 Oliver Keyes
 Research Analyst
 Wikimedia Foundation 

-- 
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog