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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) by dalek on Thursday June 01, @08:22PM (8 children)
This is not a discussion about whether you have confidence in the staff. The ground rules say:
I do respect the concerns about 1) what information is stored, 2) who has access to that information, and 3) how that information can be shared. If you are concerned about the ability of staff in some circumstances to determine which users posted AC comments, and how they use that information, those are also valid concerns, and I appreciate them. I will ensure that these are brought up for discussion in subsequent journals.
Please limit the discussion to the actual privacy issues instead of criticisms of current staff members for past actions.
EXTERMINATE
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05, @02:11AM (7 children)
Umm, no? Is that why you made a new journal, to bury the criticisms again? Personally all that is needed is honesty and apologies for bad community management. Sadly it seems SN is doubling down on tyranny by committee. Very musky.
(Score: 1) by dalek on Monday June 05, @07:09AM (5 children)
The new journal directly links to this journal twice in its first paragraph, and the first three words of the title are "Privacy policy updates." The new journal explicitly and conspicuously addresses this one, and it also explicitly encourages people to continue discussing the topics of this journal here. This journal had started to slip down the recent journals Slashbox, and the rate of comments had waned significantly. If anything, the new journal draws more attention to this one than it had been receiving. Moreover, I indicated that I would continue to review this journal and create a complete list of all the privacy concerns that have been raised. You have a very unusual and unique definition of what it means to bury criticisms. Also, the fact that I posted this journal does not prohibit me from also posting other journals to discuss other topics that are of interest to me.
Now, I fully support honesty and transparency. I think there are some misunderstandings of how Rehash works, but this can be addressed by properly documenting how the code works, especially in regard to user privacy. And I support summarizing that in the privacy policy in a way that's easily understood. There could even be an FAQ with questions about how the code works, with accurate answers. As I recall, there was an infamous thread on Slashdot investigating troll comments, and it picked up a vast amount of off-topic mods. Moreover, people who modded up comments in that thread discovered that they no longer had the ability to moderate. At least some of these criticisms were addressed in Slashdot's FAQ, with questions such as if editors can moderate. I should also point out that Slashdot had scripts to make users automatically post at -1 and to silently revoke their moderator privileges, the later of which was done at a large scale to people who modded up comments in the aforementioned thread. The editors also spent hundreds of their unlimited mod points in that thread. I support transparency and honesty, and that's a topic that will be up for discussion in a future journal.
As I stated, the criticisms of staff that you're referencing are off-topic in this journal:
The good news is that I have a solution to offer to you that will meet your needs. From your description, it seems that you'd like to have a journal with a topic that's outside the scope of this one. If your goal is to have a discussion about criticizing SN staff for past mistakes and to criticize the existing code, you have a way to do this, and to have it be completely on-topic. All you have to do is create your own journal that's dedicated to those specific topics. Because that journal would be posted from your own account, you could ensure that the only topics that are discussed are the ones that you want to discuss. If you want a journal to discuss topics that are outside the scope of this journal, why not create your own? If my journal isn't satisfactory for your purposes, what's getting in the way of you creating your own?
I wholeheartedly encourage you to create your own journal, express your criticisms of the staff and the existing code, and post it with comments enabled for everyone. Your criticisms will be displayed far more prominently than any of your comments in this journal. Your criticisms will get far more visibility, and the community can discuss those topics without any distractions like the code base or proposed drafts of the privacy policy. Why not post your own journal to make sure that your criticisms are as visible as possible, with no distractions at all? What's stopping you?
EXTERMINATE
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05, @09:23AM (4 children)
Dalek's attempt to bury the "town hall" mysteriously coincides with a magical disappearing janrinok post to NCommander's journal, where he complained about SN's faults all being laid at the feet of "staff", or, him. I suspect puppetry of socks.
(Score: 1) by dalek on Monday June 05, @11:11AM (3 children)
I'm under no obligation to tolerate your behavior.
The current effort to develop a privacy policy is a genuine attempt to listen to the community's concerns and to be more respectful about privacy in the future. I am a volunteer, not even an actual member of the staff, trying to oversee this process. I fully intend to bring any actual privacy concern up for discussion, whether it involves transparency, logging and data retention, anonymous posting, the right to be forgotten, how to ensure that privacy is actually being respected, and anything that's remotely relevant to the topic of user privacy. I'm here to support privacy and to do right by the community.
None of this means that I'm required to stand by while you refuse to respect the ground rules of my journal or accuse me of things that are factually untrue. If I said I've had enough and walked away from this effort because of your abuse, it's very possible that you'll be stuck with the privacy status quo. I'd just like to point out that the status quo is something you've repeatedly said you strongly oppose. This is a great opportunity to do something about it and to have real and enforceable policies to protect privacy. But it means you have to play by the ground rules, and you haven't been doing so.
I'm not your property, and you don't get to make demands of me. I think it's important to have these discussions, but my volunteer effort to work on a better privacy policy does not mean that I can't talk about other topics just because they're inconvenient for you. Once again, you don't own me.
I fully intend to do right by the community, which encompasses everyone who visits and participates at SN. The community is not one or two people. It is everyone, regardless of whether or not I agree with their political views, share their interests, or get along with them personally. Everyone who wants to speak up on the topic of privacy deserves to express their opinions without being drowned out by your off-topic attempts to antagonize people. You're fortunate that this town hall doesn't involve everyone gathering in a meeting room to discuss their opinions. If it were, someone who behaved like you and tried to disrupt the discussion would probably be escorted out in handcuffs by the local police for disorderly conduct and would spend the night in jail.
If you have real suggestions about what the privacy policy should include or how it should be developed, I'm happy to hear you out. If you don't wish to discuss those things, then kindly go away. The next journal about developing a privacy policy will be posted about a week from today. There will be at least one more after that, and quite possibly more. If I see fit to discuss other topics in my journal during this process, topics such as motorsports, that's my right, and you have zero grounds to complain about it. Even if you don't care about the privacy policy, at least have the decency to stop trying to disrupt a process that will benefit many other community members.
EXTERMINATE
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05, @08:46PM (2 children)
Dalek, just listen to yourself! Behave! Your story about the troll mod discussion is complete fabrication, a lie, in other words. You can demand compliance with janrinok's rules all you want, but you have no power here. (*Dalek turns into a large Snowy Owl*)
(Score: 1) by dalek on Tuesday June 06, @12:42AM (1 child)
Not a fabrication at all. Here's the thread: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=2850660 [slashdot.org].
And four years later, the thread was discussed in https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183628&cid=15166303 [slashdot.org], and at least one user reported that they were still banned for moderating in the first thread.
EXTERMINATE
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07, @09:39AM
That would be aristarchus, then.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05, @09:20AM
In the past, it was common practice to displace journals where the alt-right was having its ass handed to it. Most of the time, a Runaway1956 journal would be immediately followed by a boring and technically inane entry by takyon. Did not really work, though, other than to telegraph their fear and desperation.