Privacy

It’s been almost a month since I last wrote. But don’t suffer, I’m not going to ditch the blog. It so happens that life in the real world matters, especially if you have a salary to earn and work to do.

And plenty has happened these days. In the real world, my country is preoccupied with the high school student movement.

The people who robbed the camp my daughter was at have been arrested (see violence)

And a new controversy has settled into the Spanish-language blogosphere.

Whether there is a conspiracy against Meneame on Fresqui’s part, I don’t know, I have no idea. Often conspiracies are nothing of the sort, and only show the clumsy behavior of some hothead.

But I’m going to allow myself to say something, because it has to do with the privacy of meneame’s users. I mean the logging of IP addresses.

Technically it’s possible to trace the IPs associated with each action of a user through the web server’s logs (Apache, for example). But it’s laborious, and you need a lot of time to do it.

Ricardo Galli has concluded that there is a concerted effort to discredit Meneame, and he takes advantage of the fact that IPs are recorded in Meneame’s database, as you can verify by reading Meneame’s code.

That way, a vote, a comment, or almost any action on Meneame can be traced easily.

I think this capability should be spelled out in Meneame’s terms of use.

It’s true that those of us who have read Meneame’s code know that, and much more, but not all users know it (and clearly the alleged conspirators didn’t know it, or ignored it).

Is this tracking of IPs good or bad?

That’s for each person to judge.

However, many personal data protection laws allow users to request that these records be deleted.

I don’t like that what I do on meneame can be traced so easily, but at least I know that it’s done and how, because I have access to the source code. But that’s no guarantee either, because the published code is one thing and the code running on the servers is another.

On the other hand, with fresqui I’m blind, because I don’t have access to their source code and I don’t know what they do with my IPs. But I can suspect something, since Fresqui is based on Drupal, as you can tell from the traces in its pages.

The issue is, what happens when the code behind a service is partly public? Should the derived code be published? Should it be acknowledged that it’s being used?

What is ethical is that credit must be given to those who deserve it