[Noisebridge-discuss] list archives, redaction, search engines, and privacy

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Andy Isaacson wrote:

> At the request of one of our members (who wants to keep their first+last
> name from being associated with Noisebridge, but the full name was
> posted to the board list) I've added a robots.txt to www.noisebridge.net
> that should block /pipermail/board/ from being indexed by google and
> other reasonable web indexers.
>
> The block is specific to the board archive, and should not affect the
> -discuss list.
>
> Depending on how that works out, we may end up deciding to redact the
> archives more explicitly.

What I've done in the past when this sort of thing happened at acm.jhu.edu 
was 'chmod 000' the HTML file in question from the archives, and that's 
it.

Your robots.txt method seems good, too, and I should probably have used 
that instead of the chmod approach.

> I'd personally prefer not to edit the archives, but I fully understand
> and support individuals having control over their deets and achieving
> their own preferred degree of information disclosure.  So, there are
> a few options under consideration:
>
> 0. do nothing
> 1. use robots.txt to request non-indexing of /pipermail/board/
> 1.5. use robots.txt to request non-indexing of the specific messages
> 2. edit the archive ("s/John Doe/John #########/g")
> 3. remove the offending messages from the archive (replacing it with
> "removed at the request of a member")
> 4. remove the offending messages without leaving a notice
> 5. make the archives require a login (possibly a trivial login just to
> defeat indexing).
>
> currently we're at 1.0; IMO 1.5 and 3. are the relevant alternatives.
> (Somehow, to me, 3. seems less Newspeak than 2., but perhaps that's just
> me.)

I think that saying s/John Doe/John REDACTED/ is okay. Making the removal 
clear is what's important to avoid feeling Newspeak.

That's just my feeling; I'm not making a claim as to what you ought to do 
right now. Right now I ought to go to bed, and that is something I can 
get behind.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
<Addi> Alter.net seems to have replaced one of its router with a zucchini.