Matthew Brown wrote:
On 6/18/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
This shows an astonishing ignorance of the effects that a person's comments can have on another.
It doesn't make jayjg's statement any less true, however. Regardless of whether he should have acted as he did, there is no breach of privacy involved, unless you extend the definition of privacy to go beyond real-world identities, which I think is a bit of a stretch.
If you define "privacy" narrowly enough, no, I suppose you could argue there was no "breach". But there certainly *was* a breach of confidentiality.
It's simple: checkuser is a special tool, that most people don't have access to, that reveals information otherwise secret. Those with checkuser ability should not be revealing that information -- any of it -- willy-nilly.
The piece of information "User:CharlotteWebb has edited using TOR" was formerly secret. Revealing it was clearly -- as the length of this mailing list thread shows! -- not an innocuous act. You could claim without too much exaggeration that it's done as much damage to CharlotteWebb's persona as do the vicious "outing" practices of those other Wikipedia satellite websites we don't mention.
Don't say, "Revealing that CharlotteWebb used TOR reveals nothing about her real identity". Don't say, "Revealing that she used TOR is okay since it's not a damaging revelation." Those statements are both quite beside the point. Pledging not to reveal confidential information means that you won't reveal the confidential information, period. It does not mean that you'll selectively reveal bits of it if you can concoct an argument saying it's "okay".
(Finally, don't say "Revealing the information wouldn't have been so damaging if only CharlotteWebb had reacted differently". That's blaming the victim.)