[Foundation-l] Data retention

[Alex]

Anthony wrote:
> 
> I don't see why checkuser can't be watered down, to simply provide a
> "YES/NO" answer, and that two or three WMF employees can have access to the
> actual IP addresses (with all but one of those employees only having it for
> backup/emergency purposes).  Unlike in the past, blocking of a username
> automatically blocks the IP address, even if the user doesn't try to make
> any edits, so isn't checkuser basically just for investigations of ongoing
> abuse which can wait a few days for a WMF person to get around to it?
> 

It would only work in the most obvious of sock puppetry cases, and could
still be wrong. If the person doing the check can't see the IP, they
have no way of knowing if its an open proxy or Tor node, a dynamic IP, a
shared IP, a static IP, etc. They just know that the users are using the
same IP (which is presumably what would trigger a YES). What if the
users were in the same range of addresses? What if they have the same
user-agent or XFF but different IPs? What if they are on the same IP but
with a different user-agent or XFF? Or a different, but similar user-agent?

What if we can't wait a few days to get the IP address, say a user using
proxies or dynamic IPs to use avoid autoblocks, see Spacebirdy's
userrights/globalblock/global account logs on meta for an example, an
autoblock would only affect one wiki, then they go to another one to
create more accounts. Or what if they have other accounts that they
registered, but haven't used yet?

-- 
Alex (w:en:User:Mr.Z-man)