Re: Mailing List Privacy Awareness

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi :)

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 01:56:09PM +0000, Kouters, E.T.M. wrote:
> We are computer science researchers from the Eindhoven University of 
> Technology. As part of an on-going academic study on how GNOME developers and 
> users use the mailing lists for communication, we are mining GNOME archives. 
cool!

> One of our observations pertains to inclusion of email headers in the archive: 
> these headers often contain the IP address from which a message was sent; [...]
>
> We are wondering how sensitive such information would be considered by you or 
> the GNOME community. Would this represent a privacy concern?
I guess it would.
> Has anyone raised the issue before?
Not that I am aware of.
> While list participants are surely aware that "all messages 
> sent to gnome.org<http://gnome.org> mailing lists will be archived" and they 
> "should not include any information in [their] postings that [they] would not 
> wish to become publicly available for the indefinite future" (as described on 
> the website), they might not aware that such a history of geo locations can be 
> (easily) reconstructed.
True. We could probably strip all headers but the subject (and from) when 
generating the archives. Ideally, the software generating our archives, Mhonarc, 
provides that feature.

cheers,
  Tobi