On 6/18/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm a member of the community and I want to know what information
about me can be gained incidently through check user and then is not
considered private and may be revealed?
If somebody requested a checkuser on you, policy would explicitly allow me
to reveal:
(a) your use of a large national or multinational ISP, such as AOL, NTL, BT,
Telestra
(b) the country you're dialing in from
Use of a Tor proxy falls into the same sort of category, and has been
generally treated that way (as have all open proxies). No personally
identifying information can be gleaned from such revelations; in fact, less
is revealed than in the explicitly permitted data. The purpose of
restricting information obtained via Checkuser is to prevent personally
identifying information from being released; releasing such information can
be downright dangerous to the editor thus revealed, especially if they
happen to reside in an authoritarian or worse country. There is no such risk
in revealing the use of open proxies; the whole point of Tor is to prevent
such risk, and it does so pretty well, from what I can tell. In CW's case,
all we know is that some editor who goes by the label Charlotte Webb (a
wonderful name) is one of hundreds of thousands of Tor users; there's no way
to know from that who or what CW is in real life.
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--jpgordon ∇∆∇∆