track and publish IP addresses

[chadwhitacre]

Wow, this gets tricky. Where is the boundary between openness and privacy?

I want to take the mickey out of Big Brother's demands for data by tracking IP addresses and then making that public information. Transcend the whole game that both WikiLeaks and various governments are wasting human energy on.

But then what about the anonymity at the heart of Gittip? I hate the idea of being forced to fork that over. It's humiliating and degrading. Possible solutions:

1. Fork it over anyway.
2. Resist, meet force with force.
3. Not have anything to hide in the first place.

Or, taking the idea of a warrant canary one step further, perhaps Gittip wants a policy such that if any information is disclosed to a government, then all similar information for all users on Gittip is made fully public. This would go in terms of service (#344).

This came up in investigating Gittip abuse (#329).

[ChimeraCoder]

Where is the boundary between openness and privacy?

Where is the contradiction between openness and privacy?

These are only contradictory insofar as identity remains singular and permanent - one of the effects of requiring sign-in through an OAuth provider, for example (for the most part, anyway).

I'd discourage the idea of tracking and publishing IP addresses on principle, even though those can often be changed and masked if needed.

It is already incredibly, incredibly tricky to make truly anonymous payments transfers of money online - for reasons outside of Gittip's control. But that doesn't mean Gittip should make that any harder; there are plenty of valid reasons to want to support a developer's work without linking that to every other facet of the supporter's identity. IP addresses add yet another hurdle to that.

Put another way, Gittip can be open as a company without forcing its users to be equally open about their personal lives.

[ironchefpython]

track and publish IP addresses

This does little to dissuade actual criminals (who use VPNs and proxies), yet erodes the anonymity of legitimate users.

[chadwhitacre]

Agreed. Not storing IP addresses in the first place is the easiest solution.

[chadwhitacre]

Note that @balanced stores IP address, for those with a Balanced account. Presumably Twitter and GitHub do the same.

[thiloplanz]

Not storing IP addresses in the first place is the easiest solution.

I'd also like to see Google Analytics removed (of course, if one really minds, one can block that client-side, I know I do). I appreciate it provides useful metrics for you, but don't you already get enough of those from the actual usage/payment data?

[clone1018]

@thiloplanz You really don't, google analytics provides tons of information beyond just who does what, it tells us where users come from, how they're using the site, the technology their using the browse the site. It helps us improve the site in ways normal users wont even notice.