Microid mailing list

[Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter AT jabber.org>]

Evan Prodromou wrote:

> 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".

Those sounds like good defaults. And also it seems we need to educate
people about MicroIDs, eh?

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml

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