WJhonson wrote:
Regardless of what occurred with the AOL details, that is a "Red Herring" as I said, because such an event would not and could not occur with Wikipedia details.
People regardless of whether or not they searched their own personal details within the AOL search engine... would not search their own personal details within the Wikipedia engine.
I think you missed my point: that lots of innocent data pieced together tell a new story.
People may not search their name in Wikipedia (although I'm not too sure about that, many people might want to search for their surname looking for famous ancestors). They may not search for local shops, but will search for their home town, the university they attended, their favorite car brands and sports, and so on (please show a little imagination here).
Here is just one example of an article that may invoke scrutiny of contributors. http://tinyurl.com/2axrcar
Erik Zachte
On 28 November 2010 23:08, Erik Zachte erikzachte@infodisiac.com wrote:
People may not search their name in Wikipedia (although I'm not too sure about that, many people might want to search for their surname looking for famous ancestors).
Idle thought: given how quick people sometimes are to spot changes to "their" article, how many BLPs of limited notability have the subject as the most common reader? There's certainly an issue there...
That said, the most obvious problem with things like IP-article view data is that disclosing IPs (or non-IP identifiers) would make it fairly easy to reconstruct the browsing patterns of editors. Casual readers, not so much, but editors would be trivial - look for a fairly obscure page which was edited recently by a single user, look at the pageviews for that page, and you've almost certainly pinpointed the IP/identifier for that editor.
At which point, you can easily discover their great fondness for reading about something embarrassing...
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