On 6/15/07, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/15/07, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)
<newyorkbrad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
No privacy violation is involved because mentioning that an individual
edits
through proxies does not reveal anything about the person's real-life
identity or location nor even link the person with other Wikipedia
accounts.
This is a point worth re-iterating. I haven't revealed anything about
"CharlotteWebb". "CharlotteWebb" is a pseudonym, obviously based on
the book
"Charlotte's Webb". I cannot reveal anything personal about the person who
is using the CharlotteWebb account because I don't know anything about them.
Nothing. I don't know their name, age, gender, location, height, weight,
shoe size, nationality, religion, native language, even their IP address. I
know *nothing* about them, and I cannot reveal what I do not know.
The type of data involved is triggering a lot of people's "This smells
like personal data" senses today, though.
If they'd been using something other than a Tor node, and you revealed
(for example) that the user in question logged in from Earthlink all
the time, that would probably be clearly over the line, even though
it's still relatively harmless in the greater scheme of things.
IMHO, we shouldn't ban Tor without blocking them completely. Making
it against policy but not actively aggressively enforcing that allows
grey areas like this, where a user is using and not abusing the
service and sees nothing wrong with what they're doing, and then is
put in a position of defending themselves.
As Tony's said on-wiki (in Jeff's RFAR), policy is what works, not
what's written down. What works, right now, is using Tor
non-abusively. The written policy therefore is wrong. Vetoing
CaroletteWebb's RFA on the ground that s/he violated a written but
grossly unenforced policy is bad for the project.
If the current set of abuse problems is significant enough,
particularly admin accounts being subverted, we should just permablock
all the Tor exit points and be done with it.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com