[Microid] MicroID support on Yedda

Fred Stutzman fred at metalab.unc.edu
Mon Nov 20 11:29:53 EST 2006


Yaniv,

I think that is a great middle ground.  You can generally never go wrong 
giving your users more control over their experience.

-Fred



On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Yaniv Golan wrote:

> This is a good point, I had a nagging suspicion that such "evil"
> scenarios could exist, but you have crystallized it into a
> comprehensive list :)
>
> You could of course say that if someone would like to keep their
> identity hidden, they could use a different email alias as well. But I
> guess that many people will not think about this, at least not
> *before* disaster strikes.
>
> I'd like to make this as sign-up opt-in option, but I see an issue
> here with explaining to users what this is about. I can't really see a
> good way to explain - in non-developers terms - what this option
> means, what are the benefits and drawbacks. Maybe in a year or two,
> when MicroID is more mainstream, but not yet.
>
> So I guess what we'll do on Yedda is to turn this on by default, and
> provide our users with the option to turn this off:
>
> "[X] Associate my Yedda Profile with my identity (using MicroID) (tell
> me more about this)"
>
> How does this sound?
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: microid-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:microid-
>> bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Evan Prodromou
>> Sent: Monday, November 20, 2006 5:07 PM
>> To: microid at lists.ibiblio.org
>> Subject: Re: [Microid] MicroID support on Yedda
>>
>> On Mon, 2006-20-11 at 13:10 +0200, Yaniv Golan wrote:
>>>
>>> I do have one question though. Do you think that this should be an
>>> opt-in feature for users or an always-on feature? Is there any
>>> potential downside to have the user's MicroID published
>>> automatically?
>>
>> As far as I can tell, there's one downside, and that's the privacy
>> issue. Tying together different identities has its downsides as well
>> as
>> its upsides.
>>
>> Let's posit a dissident in a repressive country. She works on
>> controversial articles ("democracy", "terrorism", whatever) on her
>> local-language version of Wikipedia. Agents of the government who
>> _suspect_ that this pseudonymous author is actually
>> jane.doe at example.com
>> could use MicroID to test if the two are the same person.
>>
>> Another example: Under a pseudonym, Fred writes a blog on a public
>> blogging service with dishy gossip about his company. Embarrassed by
>> the
>> bad publicity, his company tries verifying the MicroID on the page
>> against each email address on the company email list until they come
>> up
>> with a hit on Fred's. He gets fired.
>>
>> Admittedly, these are extreme situations. But a lot of people who
>> want
>> to keep their seemingly-innocuous alternate identities distinct from
>> each other and from their "real" identity. A nosey entity with a big
>> list of emails and a lot of time could identify any user account
>> they
>> want.
>>
>> For the MicroID extension for MediaWiki that I wrote for Wikitravel,
>> I
>> added a preference checkbox so that users could control whether or
>> not
>> to publish a MicroID. I let site administrators decide whether to
>> make
>> this checkbox default to "on" or "off", and the default for the
>> shipped
>> extension is "off".
>>
>> -Evan
>>
>>
>> --
>> Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Microid at lists.ibiblio.org
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/microid
>
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-- 
Fred Stutzman
claimID.com
919-260-8508
AIM: chimprawk



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