Microid mailing list

["Yaniv Golan" <yaniv AT yedda.com>]

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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