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  • From: Fred Stutzman <fred AT metalab.unc.edu>
  • To: Yaniv Golan <yaniv AT yedda.com>
  • Cc: microid AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Microid] MicroID support on Yedda
  • Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:29:53 -0500 (EST)

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
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_______________________________________________
Microid mailing list
Microid AT lists.ibiblio.org
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--
Fred Stutzman
claimID.com
919-260-8508
AIM: chimprawk





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