[kwlug-disc] kwlug-disc mailing list privacy

[Ron Singh]

Oh my!

There is certainly passion in the very well-articulated(albeit at
times a tad peevish), response below.

My 2 cents, as a barely coherent newbie to Linux and KWLUG --
- I have come to appreciate dearly the resources KWLUG represents in
it's present form.
- I have to come appreciate the people who make KWLUG happen on a
purely volunteer basis.
- I have come to appreciate(in no small measure) the members of KWLUG.
- My limited experience with KWLUG's website has been one of reading
various postings by the membership where the topics were really quite
FLOSS-y in nature. There was nothing that popped out at me that could
possibly encourage bodily harm to the poster, but I have not read
every entry of every thread since the LUG started.
- I cannot fathom any reason for anyone to post a missive that might
attract anything more than some sharp words.

- I can only imagine Paul and Andrew and and and...are quite busy as
it is maintaining KWLUG and curating it's contents.

I vote the KWLUG maintains the status quo.
Make no changes other that the "Heed ye, all visitors" banner on the
greeting page of the LUG's website. Any additional measure will
involve great effort from the LUG's volunteers and value attached is
nebulous at best.

With all respect,

Ron Singh
*"who harbours no fear of potential harm by posting this message even
after having had too many cuba libres in this random Caribbean island
tonight*


On 12/16/18, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc <kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> wrote:
>
>
> I received a response from the original poster, who asked me to
> forward it to the list. I am doing so that the person in question can
> make their voice heard.
>
> I am hoping this won't inflame an acrimonious discussion.
>
> As for steps to take, I will add a heads-up to the kwlug-disc signup
> page that the archives are public, because that is easy to do.
>
> Some of the other suggestions seem interesting (such as leaving
> archives public but anonymizing identities) but I personally am not
> planning to take that on now.
>
> - Paul
>
>
> ------
>
> If you could relay my response below on the list, I would very much
> appreciate it.
>
> --
>
> I'd like to address a few of the arguments I've seen while following
> this discussion.
>
> Firstly, a number of people mentioned spam, and seemed to assume that
> this was my reason for not wanting the archives to be public. This is
> not the case. Spam is a nuisance, but one that can be taken care of
> easily enough with properly configured filters. For those who use major
> email providers that have very good spam filtering (like Gmail) or those
> who self-host but use their own anti-spam measures, this can be a non-issue.
>
> An analogy was made between public mailing list archives and
> conversations at parties, the idea being that it's like walking through
> a room and listening to different people talk, joining in if you want
> to. However, I do not believe this is a good comparison. In-person
> conversations (unless recorded with a microphone) are inherently
> ephemeral, limited in time by human memory and scope by proximity to the
> speaker. The internet is different. It is permanent, more or less. What
> you say may follow you around for the rest of your life, easily accessed
> by anyone. Maybe you don't think you've said anything controversial, and
> yet "controversial" is a subjective notion and can change very easily
> over time. What's acceptable to support or denounce today may become
> unacceptable tomorrow.
>
> A number of people have suggested using a different email address as a
> pseudonym. This is a fine suggestion, unless you've screwed up (as I
> have) and already said things you don't want public on your regular
> email. This can either be because you didn't know the lists were public
> in the first place, or because your views have shifted over time and
> you've come to regret things you've said, or perhaps you just got
> carried away in the heat of the moment (as can happen to the best of us)
> and had a momentary lapse in judgment. (Additionally, pseudonyms can be
> broken over time. If you use one too long, it can become easy to build a
> profile on you that can in theory be matched to your real world
> identity. And this is ignoring all of the technical ways that pseudonyms
> can be broken.)
>
> Many have also made arguments about the ideal of openness, and the
> availability of public knowledge. I sympathize with this. However, I
> don't know that it applies as strongly here as it would with, say, an
> actual FLOSS project. As Khalid mentioned, I have never searched for a
> tech-related query and found a thread on the KWLUG mailing list. I
> somewhat doubt that anyone has, or at least the number is probably very
> close to zero. Also, in my opinion, mailing list archives are hardly the
> ideal place for aggregation of important knowledge. That should be done
> on something like a wiki, where relevant details are not scattered
> across many pages. Mailing lists are useful for having a discussion and
> arriving at a consensus, but a person looking for the consensus and not
> everything leading up to it should hardly need to browse through dozens
> of pages filled with dense text to find it! Any important information
> which it would be a shame to lose should not be stored solely on one
> mailing list, and in the case of KWLUG in particular, I doubt that there
> is any important information that can only be found on these archives
> and not elsewhere.
>
> And yet, even if you do not find that argument persuasive, that still
> leaves room for a compromise solution where the messages of the archives
> themselves remain public but without any identifier (name or email
> address) attached to them. This is not a perfect solution, since there
> may be identifying information inside the body of the email itself, but
> it would at least be an improvement.
>
> A few more quick rebuttals to other arguments:
>
> - Sometimes it may be useful to share messages in the archives with
> non-members. Yet this does not require the archives to be public.
> Forwarding the email would do, or even a simple copy-paste.
>
> - Likewise for those who want to see what this list is like before
> joining it. Similar solutions as above would work. Or they could simply
> join and then unsubscribe if it wasn't what they were expecting.
>
> - Someone mentioned the fact that many members keep their own private
> archives, and making the official archives private would do nothing to
> delete those other copies. This does not really worry me. Additionally,
> an argument was made that anyone who kept such archives could
> theoretically make them public. But if, hypothetically, we arrived at
> the consensus to make these archives private, I'd like to think there's
> no one so spiteful among us who would publish their own private copy
> publicly, at least not without removing identifying information first.
>
> - Archive searches. Of course, these would still be possible for members
> who keep their own private archives, and those who don't could either
> ask someone who does to run a query, or simply download the archives (as
> GNU Mailman allows you to do) and grep.
>
> There is one message I would like to personally address:
>
>
>
>> On Dec 6, 2018, at 8:07 AM, Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account)
>> wrote:
>>>> On Dec 6, 2018, at 12:37 AM, Andrew Sullivan Cant
>> <acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>>> Again, I realize that this would not be perfect, but would probably
>>> reduce the likelihood of mailing list messages popping up in searches.
>>> And it is simpler than having to authenticate who is on the mailing list
>>> and who is not.
>>
>
>> Caution: this is from pre-coffee Andrew; it’s perhaps written more
>> sharply than post-coffee Andrew, but the opinions expressed are
>> correct.
>
>> This seems counter to the idea of public discourse. Personally I
>> *want* mailing list results to show up in web searches.
>
> Why? Members can search the archives on their own, and the utility of
> non-members being able to search the archives, as explained above, is
> likely very low.
>
>> If you don’t want your email identified, there are (low effort) things
>  that can be done to help that.
>>
>> If you don’t want your name showing up, use a pseudonym.
>
> Again, as explained above, this does not help with messages that were
> already sent without one.
>
>> if you don’t want your *text* showing up: don’t post. Keep your
>> information to yourself. I think it’s awfully selfish to post on a
>> list such as this and then hold it close to your chest because someone
>> outside of your network might see it. That’s not what this list is
>> about, in my opinion. We’re here to ask questions, share knowledge and
>> exchange pithy one-liners. Whether the person reading it is in Guelph
>> or Guangzhou is irrelevant; they may have the same question and a
>> simple answer may be found here. Why would you want to prevent that?
>
> I'm selfish for fearing the consequences of messages I thought were
> private actually being visible to the entire world? Really?
>
> And once more, as explained above, I seriously doubt that the answer to
> anyone's question can be found here and only here. "Ah, I'm so
> incredibly glad that this random LUG mailing list contained the solution
> to my problem that could not have been found anywhere else on the entire
> internet!" -- said no one ever. If that is the case, it shouldn't be,
> and that knowledge should be shared elsewhere.
>
>> This thread seems to be getting less about privacy and more about
>> knowledge-hoarding or what I’m going to call citadel-ism: keeping
>> knowledge away from those who you feel are “other” or “unworthy". This
>> list was always about public discourse. If you want an elite “members
>> only” list, feel free to create one, but don’t take the years of open
>> exchange from this one and make it hidden in the name of “privacy”.
>
> This could not be further from the truth, and I believe you are arguing
> in bad faith. The quotes you put around "privacy" really don't help in
> this regard. Privacy *is* the issue for me, believe it or not.
>
>> Of course, all this ‘you’ is not to you personally, Andrew, nor to
>> anyone in this thread.
>
>
> Then to whom, precisely, is it addressed? You've created a straw man
> argument that no one on this list actually believes and attacked that
> instead of the main point.
>
> Caution: this is from pre-rested anon; it's perhaps written more sharply
> than post-rested anon, but the opinions expressed are correct.
>
> There's your pithy one-liner.
>
> My apologies if that response was a bit sharp, but then so was yours, so
> let's call it even.
>
> Anyway...
>
> I'd like to expand on the reasons why I'm personally so concerned about
> this. Of course, I'm limited in the extent that I can do so, since
> pointing to specific messages would defeat the point of saying this
> (semi-)anonymously and only serve to draw more attention to the things I
> don't want getting attention. Thus, all I can really say is that I've
> said a few things on this list that I wouldn't have said if I'd known at
> the time that it would be public and directly tied to my identity.
>
> These things might seem innocuous to most if I told you, but I believe
> that they could potentially, under certain circumstances, threaten my
> personal privacy, liberty, or even safety. That's all I can say.
>
> Overall, it seems like I'm a little outnumbered here. I can't fault
> anyone for expressing their opinion, but I'd be lying if I said some of
> these responses didn't make me feel a little more hesitant about
> participating in KWLUG.
>
> Finally, I'd like to close by saying that even if you all do not find
> this persuasive, and we don't make the archives private, at the very
> least, it needs to be made *very clear* to anyone who joins this list
> that these archives are public and potentially permanent, and that their
> messages may follow them around forever. It wasn't clear to me. That was
> my mistake, and I take full responsibility for it, but I at least don't
> want this to happen to anyone else.
>
>
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>


-- 
Thanks,

Ron Singh