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

[John Menerick]

My comments on each option.

0. There is always a choice.  ;-)

1. Only the big 3-4 search engines will abide by robots.txt.  Limited bang
for the buck.  Especially when one is dealing with privacy concerns.

1.5. Same as option 1.

2. I prefer this option the best.  However, make sure to make a comment such
as "Modified by XYZ by the request of the NB community as noted here...." or
something to that affect.

3. I do not like changing the archives and erasing the past.  It opens
everything up to question.  :\ "I didn't say that.  Someone must have
changed it."  Since the uniquely identifiable piece of information was not
the message itself but a word/phrase, no need to delete the entire message.

4. No.

5. As long as the public, at large, can view the archives, works for me.
However, that will not stop someone from going through there and hunting
down the uniquely personal identifiable piece of information.




How do journalists redact/retract this type of information?



John
liquidsun





On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 11:58 PM, Asheesh Laroia <noisebridge at asheesh.org>wrote:

> 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.eduwas '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.
>
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> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
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>
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