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[Fred Stutzman <fred AT metalab.unc.edu>]

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>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Microid mailing list
> > Microid AT lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/microid
>
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--
Fred Stutzman
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919-260-8508
AIM: chimprawk