[Foundation-l] New draft of privacy policy

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/6/15 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> 2008/6/15 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
>> Someone should answer Gregory's question first: "Why do we grant the
>> equivalent of checkuser rights over a majority of our contributors to
>> every person on the planet?"
>>
>> "Historical accident" was the only thing I could come up with.
>
> It's hard not to. If we were to say assign a random number to every IP
> then by now someone would have published a partial list of number to
> IP relationships. If the number assigns keep changing well we know the
> problems that we had with AOL back in the day.

You can do it with a hash. Each hash could be mapped to from multiple
IP addresses, so it's impossible to work out the IP address from the
hash. Of course, you then have the risk of collisions, but that can be
kept fairly small, and isn't the end of the world - we get collisions
anyway when multiple people use one IP address.

That said, I don't have a problem with publishing IP addresses of anon
users - it's made clear to them that that will happen, and they have
the option of registering if they have want to keep it hidden. The
risk from having your IP address publicly known is really pretty
minimal (mine is 82.152.59.121 (or 122 if you want my actual computer,
rather the router, but the router is what's reported to the outside
world) - do with it what you will!!).