[Wikimedia-l] Pro-active user privacy (Was: Update on IPv6)

[James Forrester]

On 13 June 2012 11:09, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why is "improving anonymity" a goal? Our privacy policy governs the
> disclosure of non-public information, but the IP addresses of editors
> without an account have always been effectively public. Are IP editors
> clamoring for more privacy? Is masking IPv6 addresses more important than
> the uses to which IP addresses are currently put? Is masking a better way
> to solve the problem of potentially more identifiable information in IPv6
> than, say, a more prominent disclosure and disclaimer? Would masking the IP
> addresses only for logged-out users be a worthwhile change, given the ease
> of registering an account? Would they remain masked in the histories of
> project dumps? There are a lot of questions to answer here before it's
> reasonable to start suggesting changes be made, and these are only some.

Valuable questions.

There is certainly an argument that we should consider changing how we
doing things so that unregistered (mis-named "anonymous") editors are,
in fact, more rather than less anonymous, whichever IP version they
use to connect. We already take actions far beyond what most Internet
sites do to protect their privacy even though it's clear the vast
majority of the Web's users neither know nor care about such choices.

There are lots of things we could do - for instance, blocking all
edits except by logged-in editors would solve this (but is profoundly
against our general operating principles), auto-generating accounts by
cookie (messy, and would need the privacy policy changed), blurring
some arbitrary part of the IP (the last one octet for IP4 and four for
IP6, perhaps), etc. - but first we should have the discussion of what
we believe we want to achieve.

Can I suggest that we try to discuss this on-wiki (as it's more
inclusive of the community)? -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_user or something linked
from there would be the 'obvious' place to start.

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at wikimedia.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
(Writing in a personal capacity)