[Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?

[Andrew Gray]

On 28 November 2010 23:08, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at 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...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk