On 13 June 2012 14:29, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 2:21 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 13 June 2012 14:09, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
I believe that FT2 is saying that we should seriously consider masking
the
*publicly viewable* IPv6 addresses. The only reason that we publish the
IP
addresses of any logged-out user is for attribution purposes, although
some
use it for other reasons (both positive and nefarious). Quite honestly,
it
doesn't matter what information is put in place in the publicly viewable logs, provided it's consistent.
Risker
Sure, that's the assertion, but it leaves unanswered a lot of "why" questions. Why should we make publicly viewable attributions less identifiable than they have been for a decade? Is that step valuable at all, given the reality that anyone likely to use the IP address for "nefarious" reasons would simply register an account?
I think perhaps I was not clear in what I meant by "nefarious" purposes. The IP addresses in our contribution logs have been used by others to locate editors, to make allegations against individuals and organizations because their IP address showed up in those logs, and so on. It is a key reason why "accidentally editing logged out" is one of the top reasons for suppression requests, because it can provide a non-negligible amount of information about the user.
I think a stable, predictable privacy regime that doesn't discourage users is a perfectly good goal which Wikimedia has largely achieved. I'm not sure there is a lot of value in FT2's suggestion from a privacy perspective (it would make far more sense to make the mask applicable to everyone but CUs or admins), let alone whether a significantly more anonymous method for contributing is either necessary or desirable.
I would put to you that, actually, our publishing of full IP addresses of our logged-out contributors is a very significant privacy issue. There is no other top-10 website that publishes this information; in fact, the number of websites that attributes contributions to specific (often traceable) IP addresses is minuscule. The only rationale that has ever been given for publishing of IP addresses is for the purpose of edit attribution. That can be done any number of other ways.
Risker