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I've been approached about working on a new privacy policy for SoylentNews and have agreed to do so. This journal is the first step in that process.
SN currently runs on Rehash, which is written in Perl and dates back to Slash 2.0. Many privacy-related considerations in Rehash are dictated by decisions made by the Slashdot admins nearly 25 years ago when they wrote the original code. The age of this code and its dependencies on tools like mod_perl make it nearly unmaintainable, meaning that SN may implement a new code base sooner rather than later. This is a pivotal time to discuss a new privacy policy for SN, an the decisions made now will likely influence the implementation of whichever new code base powers SN in the future.
SN has three primary stakeholders, which are 1) the ownership, 2) the staff, and 3) the community. To be successful, any site policy needs the support of all three of these stakeholders. That means the community needs to be actively engaged in the process.
My first steps will be to solicit input from the SN community and to spend most of my time listening. There are three important questions to discuss:
1) Problems: What privacy-related considerations are important to you, the members of the SN community? What are your concerns? As long as the issues are reasonably relevant to privacy, anything should be on the table here. This includes things like what user data gets stored, how long it is retained, who has access to it, the right to be forgotten, anonymous commenting, and anything that can reasonably be construed as a privacy issue.
2) Process: All three stakeholders must be supportive of any privacy policy for it to be effective. Therefore, once a privacy policy is drafted, we need a process for all three stakeholders to approve this. I anticipate the biggest questions here will be how you, the members of the SN community, get to voice your support or to request amendments to the policy. What process would the community like us to follow for enacting policy? Do all logged-in users get to vote? Does the community elect representatives?
3) Potential Solutions: Once you, the members of the SN community, make your privacy concerns heard, we need potential solutions for those concerns. These solutions will be limited by a few constraints. To allow for robust discussions and make SN a welcoming community, we need the ability to track abuse of the site (e.g., spam comments, sock puppet account creation, gaming the moderation system, etc...) to prevent disruption of the discussions. SN is required to comply with the laws in relevant jurisdictions such as the United States and the state of Delaware. Any solutions have to be practical, given the limited financial and human resources. Working within those constraints, SN policy should go above and beyond what is merely required by law, and to maximize the privacy of the members of the community.
I'll start by posting three journals at least 7-10 days apart to discuss each of these issues. For this journal, I want to focus on the first point, which is what privacy concerns you have, What is important to you, as members of the SN community, and what do we need to address in the new privacy policy? While any discussion of privacy matters is on-topic in this journal, I'd like to try to keep the discussion focused as much as possible on privacy-related problems that we need to address.
There are a few ground rules in this discussion:
1) If you're giving examples of specific privacy concerns, please don't include actual user names or people. Please use hypothetical terms, or use generic names like "person A" and "person B."
2) The new privacy policy is forward looking, meaning that the discussion should focus on how we can be better in the future, and not on holding people responsible for past mistakes or how the existing code is written.
3) Please keep the discussion civil and welcoming. Everyone deserves a chance to participate in this discussion and to be heard. Please keep the discussion constructive and refrain from posting personal attacks. Privacy is for everyone, and that means everyone deserves to be heard. I ask that you please don't try to dominate the discussion or shout other people down, and instead let everyone make their opinions known.
4) Please keep the discussion on-topic. Any privacy-related matters are on-topic, but issues like story selection are beyond the scope of this policy. Let's keep issues like politics out of this discussion, too.
5) Please don't moderate people down unless they're off-topic, trying to dominate the discussion, shouting people down, or posting personal attacks. Even if you disagree with someone else, please don't moderate them down unless they're violating the ground rules for this discussion. I want everyone to be heard.
I pledge that I'll read every comment that you post. My direct input to this discussion will be minimal, and I probably won't post at all except maybe to answer questions or ask for more detail if appropriate. I'm not here to debate with people. I just want to listen to your concerns. Anonymous Cowards are welcome in this discussion, but all comments that I post will be from the dalek account. I have unchecked the "willing to moderate" box in my user preferences, which means that I am not moderating any comments in this discussion. I am just here to listen.
I want to make these discussions as inclusive as possible. That means I intend to allow Anonymous Coward input to all of these journals. In exchange for keeping these discussions open, I ask that you please keep these discussions on track. I will post future journals, but for now, I want to know what your privacy concerns are, and what topics we need to address in the new privacy policy.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01, @05:21PM (8 children)
Hahahahahaha
Ok, now unmask all of the sock puppets you've found and the users' main account. No personal info needed so by your standards no reason not to. What a load, and blaming your bad actions on some AC unmasking themselves is an obvious deflection.
(Score: 1) by dalek on Thursday June 01, @08:32PM (7 children)
I would like to remind you of the ground rules for this discussion:
Please follow the rules I have specified.
If you have concerns about transparency and accountability for actions taken by people who have privileged access to user data, that is a valid privacy concern that certainly can be discussed. If you believe these actions should be reviewed by a third party such as a panel of community members who don't have privileged access, that could be put up for discussion. It might not be practical to do so, and one would have to ensure that those community members are trustworthy, but it is a valid privacy concern that certainly could be discussed. If you believe there need to be clear policies for revoking privileged access for anyone who does not follow the privacy guidelines, that is also forward looking, and is a reasonable topic for discussion. I am more than willing to discuss all of these topics in subsequent journals.
However, the purpose of this journal is not to criticize staff members for past actions. It is about developing better privacy policies for the future. Please follow the ground rules I have posted for this discussion.
EXTERMINATE
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01, @10:09PM (6 children)
Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.
"However, those points can be made without referring to specific individuals, dwelling on past decisions made by the site management, posting personal attacks, or bringing politics into the discussion."
Only aristarchus was mentioned which is not a personal attack and is fair to mention since I am falsely accused of being aristarchus. If you want civility then it starts with staff and must be maintained. There are many spam mods I have received for making these complaints, which the entire community should see and are not spammed or frequently brought up outside already offtopic threads. No apologies or fixes for bad moderators makes me care even less about being more civil, so since you are requesting you (now staff) civilize first. Being in power and declaring rules based on personal bias is exactly what person B accuses person A of wanting.
As for politics, the bias has been clear for years of story selections. When staff stop allowing rightwing politics while banning leftwing topics with "that is what journals are for" then we can try ignoring politics. Your rules mean nothing when you feel self righteous in handing out spam mods for site criticism, so if person A is being targeted for spam mods then restore their accounts so you can stop making mistakes.
Yes all my points are valid, which is why they get repeated. Staff could shut me up by posting clear rules and honest technical privacy information like logged in user's ac comments tied to the username forever. Editor B is busy muddying the water with not-exactly-lies. Dalek you've been trying to remain civil, it is a hard task and I wish you the best of luck, but playing hardline authoritarian is not how to build a successful community of nerds.
- hopefully this was only posted once, so many similar posts by dalek I think this is the one that had a form error preventing submission
(Score: 1) by dalek on Thursday June 01, @10:26PM
I do appreciate your concerns and your frustrations. I'm trying to get actionable items that can be addressed going forward. Thank you for your kind words; they are much appreciated!
It seems like there's a trust issue between some community members and some members of the staff. One of the ideas I've been thinking over is community governance.
What if the community elected members to serve in various capacities, but those community members wouldn't have privileged access to the site? It could be a community advisory board to help define policy, whether that's editorial issues, amending the privacy policy, or any other matters that arise. They might help with conflict resolution, when there are concerns that a staff member might not have followed site policy. In that case, they would get access to the specific privileged information to determine the facts of the situation, but wouldn't have access to anything else. Community members might also be able to act as an appeals panel, if there's a dispute over something like a moderation ban. They wouldn't see any information except what's strictly necessary to determine the facts of the situation. We'll want to make sure there isn't an excessive workload for any individual, because these would also be volunteers.
I'm suggesting this in the hopes that community members might see this committee as their peers instead of staff members with privileged access. I don't know if this is something the community would even be willing to do, but I'll post it as a possible way to address these issues in the future.
I know this technically isn't within the scope of this journal, but I welcome feedback for this idea.
EXTERMINATE
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday June 02, @04:37AM (4 children)
dalek was asked if he would be prepared to undertake this role because he is not staff. He does not have access to any more information than you do. He is entirely independent. You couldn't be more wrong.
Why was he asked? We have received many emails from dalek over an extented period of time raising privacy issues and complaining about specific problems, all supported by well written arguments. He has strong views on the subject and he is keen to have privacy issues covered by some form of agreed document that we can all work to. He often holds our feet to the fire, but he does it correctly and we have intelligent discussions. dalek has done more to shape our views than all of the random complaints by ACs that litter otherwise intelligent discussions. We have made changes based on our earlier discussions, and you are referring to some events that happened in the past but not more recently.
As a result of these discussions, I believe that dalek can also appreciate the difficulties that we face in managing a discussion forum that is sometimes being abused to target specific individuals. That is not the purpose of this site.
You are missing the entire point of this journal entry. Lets get this sorted out now, before we end up writing any more software that makes the same mistakes that were made 25 years or more ago. We are prepared to consider dalek's findings and to try to produce an agreement that will clearly state what is acceptable and what is not.
This is the staff getting feedback from, and listening to, the community again - but a handful of you are failing to understand that. You are, in effect, silencing yourselves and the community.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02, @07:40PM (3 children)
Those discussions happened after years of these complaints being posted, glad someone finally took them seriously. We shall see if you can do better.
Your constant gaslighting where you merge the behavior of at least three separate people is your own act of witless evil. I get it, hard to deal with when they are AC. Too bad, registered user accounts aren't that much better since creation can be automated. That is the site's decision, you don't get to abuse people because your system is faulty.
I refuse to email you because these discussions should be done in the open, and there is no technical security vulnerability you would have to disclose to discuss these things. The clear fact at this point is you do not wish to let the community know just how much they are tracked and how easily admins can tell who made an "AC" comment, and you pat yourselves on the back saying users should already know everything about protecting their privacy on your site. That is usually fine, except when you champion freedom and privacy while allowing white supremacists cUz FrEE sPeEcH!@!#!$%%@!!
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by janrinok on Saturday June 03, @05:34AM (2 children)
We have been changing policy almost continuously to improve the site. We do it through consultation with the community (The Big Discussion [soylentnews.org]) which resulted in AC comments from people not logged in being removed from front page stories because the actions of a handfull of them were preventing the majority of the community being able to discuss topics intelligently. That policy change has been entirely successful.
This is another community consultation process, independent of staff control, to enable everyone to express an opinion.
Your comment is directed at an individual. Again you want to shout down those you disagree with to prevent them from expressing their views. You have made your statement. Repeating it will achieve nothing in this discussion.
Email me from a secure email account and if you want to discuss your problems like an adult. Your comment is Off-Topic in this journal entry. Hubie stated such in his introduction to the discussion.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04, @08:03AM (1 child)
Well, thanks to Hubie for starting this forum! Except, it was dalek? Janrinok, are you alright?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04, @08:46AM
Senior moment acknowledgement gets a Spam mod? OK, if there are no family members present, I will just back away from the hole situation.