[Wikitech-l] Ethical question regarding some code

Hey, I have an ethical question that I couldn't answer yet and have been asking around but no definite answer yet so I'm asking it in a larger audience in hope of a solution. For almost a year now, I have been developing an NLP-based AI system to be able to catch sock puppets (two users pretending to be different but actually the same person). It's based on the way they speak. The way we speak is like a fingerprint and it's unique to us and it's really hard to forge or change on demand (unlike IP/UA), as the result if you apply some basic techniques in AI on Wikipedia discussions (which can be really lengthy, trust me), the datasets and sock puppets shine. Here's an example, I highly recommend looking at these graphs, I compared two pairs of users, one pair that are not sock puppets and the other is a pair of known socks (a user who got banned indefinitely but came back hidden under another username). [1][2] These graphs are based one of several aspects of this AI system. I have talked about this with WMF and other CUs to build and help us understand and catch socks. Especially the ones that have enough resources to change their IP/UA regularly (like sock farms, and/or UPEs) and also with the increase of mobile intern providers and the horrible way they assign IP to their users, this can get really handy in some SPI ("Sock puppet investigation") [3] cases. The problem is that this tool, while being built only on public information, actually has the power to expose legitimate sock puppets. People who live under oppressive governments and edit on sensitive topics. Disclosing such connections between two accounts can cost people their lives. So, this code is not going to be public, period. But we need to have this code in Wikimedia Cloud Services so people like CUs in other wikis be able to use it as a web-based tool instead of me running it for them upon request. But WMCS terms of use explicitly say code should never be closed-source and this is our principle. What should we do? I pay a corporate cloud provider for this and put such important code and data there? We amend the terms of use to have some exceptions like this one? The most plausible solution suggested so far (thanks Huji) is to have a shell of a code that would be useless without data, and keep the code that produces the data (out of dumps) closed (which is fine, running that code is not too hard even on enwiki) and update the data myself. This might be doable (which I'm around 30% sure, it still might expose too much) but it wouldn't cover future cases similar to mine and I think a more long-term solution is needed here. Also, it would reduce the bus factor to 1, and maintenance would be complicated. What should we do? Thanks [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Word_distributions_of_two_users_in_… [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Word_distributions_of_two_users_in_… [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SPI -- Amir (he/him)