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Hello, BW folks,

I am somehow troubled by the lack of privacy in any Groups here in BW. This and other post is publicly available for spiders, traffic and data mining etc, as it is not HTTPS.

CS was more private in this respect, until recently.

Your thoughts?

XXX :)

i'm highly paranoid when it comes to privacy but i really think groups should be public.

most old school forums on the internet are. not making theirs is a CS bug for me.

it seems they are publishing nicknames here anyway ?

I would be more interested in those questions:

Is BW pushing people not to publish their real names on profiles? 

how to convinced the  facebook generation not to?

good questions, Acid...also shows nicely the contrast between a more European atmosphere concerning privacy issues, here at BW, rather than a more US American atmosphere at CS, where people generally seem less concerned about privacy on the internet.

i wish there was an european atmosphere on this; but most ppl have been brainwashed on those aspects for long and i'm afraid those are only nerdish concerns here.

There is (early) laws about thoses things in france. and people actually runned amok when the gov made a special "file" in the 80s.

unfortunatly they all joined facebook since.

tell me what to do folks, on the privacy spectrum: world, group, or member? I'll abstain from voting, since I don't care much and want to do what y'all want.

leave the group public... If someone wanna start a private discussion he can do it with a new thread and the mentioned options.

https makes sense if you want your gov. or provider not to know what your doing :)

since anyone can create a login and browse the whole group it doesn't make much sense .

why not creating google content ? CS would probably love the whole group not to be googled IMO

Thanks for the quick comments to my "European" ;) concerns.

FYI, here's the most recent news of what happens if one does not use HTTPS.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201183171859264925.html

(Granted, the context is much more political than here on BW, but privacy implications are similar).

Agree with Zezen!

there's a difference between being public and being crawlable by bots..

CS forums are public but NOT in google search results for example

would like to keep it open but not for search sites...

"so what setting do I choose to keep it open but not searchable?"

From what I understand: members. Anyone who knows better, please correct me.

Another issue I have seen: The page visitor feature. I dislike it as much as IP tracking on CS. BW may soon regret to have brought us over here (although I've been a member for four years) and that we already want to make all these changes, but I believe it should go. It serves no good purpose in my view.

as for the page visitor feature: some love it and some hate it.

if it's not too complicated, it could be an optional feature: either you can see who has visited yours and be seen by others, either you can disable it so you cannot be seen by others nor see who has visited yours (orkut works this way).

I reckon we each have to take responsibility for what information we put on the WWW, so i'd prefer the group to remain public, ditch the page visitor feature, more trouble than it's worth.

More generally i'm excited about the future of bw and watching (helping) it evolve! 

"ps: ip-localisation can be swiched off at cs afaik."

No, you can't. CS keeps refusing although they added a claimer themselves that it is not reliable. You can only hide that you are online when you are, but it will still record your last login time and location on your profile. Also, using anonymizer proxies has been made more and more difficult.

The last visitor's page is important for this situation:

Your phone number is listed on your (private) profile, you claim you accept short-notice and emergencies. So I get a call: "Hi, I'm sorry for [...], just got in town and [...] host me tonight?" . You can reply: wait, I need to check something, will call you back in a minute, look up the last visitor's page and check out that person's profile. You see that he's a Star Wars fan and you're very happy the feature exists, because you would have accepted him straigh otherwise, and you're a Star Trek fan. So you send a sms: "sorry dude, I'm not available".

That can happen also if you listed your IM contacts.

"I'd like to keep this group «open» and «public».

"you should consider using a different nickname to organise your virtual life in a less tracable way."

True. Goodbye, group! ;)

but can we open it searchable again on Nov 1 ?

btw it seems only some members who have their account set to be public, have their picture exposed "to the winds."

that would be fix the issue if their members name were not displayed then.

Just a thought. we all came here and jumped into this group as if this was a new site.  Maybe there are better groups for these discussions already.  Did you look or ask before setting up this group and inviting people?

Actually there is a better group but it has been sold to venture capitalists recently. :)

The option not to index a page is not really a privacy one, since it is expecte to be respected only by spiders.

It is just to avoid a spider performing searches on area intended to be used mainly by local users (such for example a local copy af the man pages), for reason of performance , or pages that are generated real time (so indexing it could be of no value) or subject to very frequent modification *to avoid to have around outdated data).

hi everyone,

I didn't specifically check to see if there was a duplicate group, here on BW, for brainstorming before creating it.

I did not invite anyone; they came here on their own. I only announced its creation on the CS Brainstorm~Redefined group.

I keep the decision to switch this group's setting to "members" on Oct 1. Let me know if you have any specific, and defensible, objection to this.

Well, it is not clear what you mean for `objections': some members (including me) have already posted the reasons for the group to remain open and public.

I guess you made a count of the posts and decided to make it private based on the number of people who asked that, didn't you?

If so, no further objections. :-)

[Edit: out of curiosity I did a quick count myself.

Private:

1. Zezen
2. Monkeywrench
3. Bahabri
4. Polyglot
5. TimLoal

Public:

1. Acidrongeur
2. Crumbking
3. Garoto
4. Thorgal67
5. Trave
6. Heresrob

Let me know if I've missed somebody.]

Happy welcoming! :-)

Please, count me on PRIVATE !!!!  Thanks!  ;)

Please count me for PRIVATE! Tks ;)

ditto for me.

asking this to be private sounds like having a diet coke during a binge drinking session to me. :)

but whatever...

from reading the whole thread i still do not get why this group shoul be hidden from non-members. Ok, some just prefer this, but thats very subjective. 

I d like this place to stay as open as possible (read -- accessible to anyone, non-members and google bots too). Reason: someone really might consider joining and contributing after looking through group topics. It is the action group and so it ought to be as welcoming to everyone not yer involved as possible.

Open to everyone, please. Thank you. 

aight friends,

I changed the group settings to "forum posts are not visible"...which I'm guessing means that we, as members, can see them but you need to join up to see the thread topics and privacy is upheld.

sound ok?

let's try it this way for a while and revisit the decision if needed. thanks! Have a fun weekend!

Private:

1. Zezen
2. Monkeywrench
3. Bahabri
4. Polyglot
5. TimLoal
6. Mairemaria
7. Midsch
8. Leoalone
9. Amstardom
10. James_Oder_Dave

Public:

1. Acidrongeur
2. Crumbking
3. Garoto
4. Thorgal67
5. Trave
6. Heresrob
7. Pablobd
8. Joesla

Private:

1. Zezen
2. Monkeywrench
3. Bahabri
4. Polyglot
5. TimLoal
6. Mairemaria
7. Midsch
8. Leoalone
9. Amstardom
10. James_Oder_Dave
11. ARHZ

Public:

1. Acidrongeur
2. Crumbking
3. Garoto
4. Thorgal67
5. Trave
6. Heresrob
7. Pablobd
8. Joesla

Because to live happy, live hidden ;)

M a n u ! (Zatopek) : Private

Thanks

I know I'm resurrecting an old discussion that some of you may consider resolved...

But from the perspective of someone relatively new here, groups privacy is confusing and uncontrollable.  I assume that what I'm writing now will be indexed by Google because I tried Googling a snippet of another group discussion and it appeared in the search results.  Maybe I'm wrong(??) - but as I write, there is nothing appearing on the web form that informs me who the audience of this post will be.  When I look at all the preceding posts in this discussion, nothing tells me which of them are viewable by non-members/search engines etc, and nothing tells me whether or not this entire thread is members-only or freely indexable.

Like TimLoal, I think best practice is to allow each author of anything published on the site (starting with groups) the ability to have complete control over their audience, and for anyone with the credentials to view that content to see what the audience is. 

When I post to a group, for example, I'd like to see a few clearly visible check boxes:

     Choose the privacy level of this post:

     [ ] 5. only me

     [ ] 4. only members of this group

     [ ] 3. only BW members (including those not a member of this group)

     [ ] 2. any person (including non-BW members) 

     [ ] 1. all people and search engines

And when I start a new group discussion myself, I would like to have the same options to apply to the entire thread, including the subject heading / title (still allowing discussion participants to choose a higher privacy level for their individual posts, should they choose to do so).

The privacy level of each item published on BW would be clearly labelled and visible by all who have privileges to view it.  Perhaps items that are hidden due to privacy could be replaced by a grey box, or some kind of indication of their absence.

The principle is one of choice and transparency.  Privacy is, IMO, not a one-size-fits-all issue.

Maybe this is too difficult to implement? I'm not a web developer.  But in my opinion, I would feel far more confident contributing to the community if I knew that I had such a level of control over my privacy.

thanks matthias -

for someone who considers themself quite observant, it's amazing what i can miss sometimes. although, if you want my opinion, that "visibility" option is, ironically, far too well concealed:  i don't understand why it's necessary to click on it to reveal the options, especially when it doesn't look like an obviously 'clickable' object (it looks more like a section header to me).

for me, there's also still the issue of controlling the privacy of my individual posts within the discussion.  as far as i can tell, this isn't yet possible (or have i missed something else?). 

say for instance the OP made the discussion thread's privacy level "world" - which i assume means that everyone can read the discussion, BW member or not.  i may have something to contribute to the discussion that i don't feel comfortable sharing with the "world" - i have no option to limit the audience of my individual post to members only, for example.

also there still remains, for me at least, the issue of transparency:  how do i know if the thread i'm posting in is visible to the "world" or just to members??

         I don't understand why a group post should be only visible by its author? 

suppose i inadvertently reveal some information about myself that i don't want published at the moment.  i can edit my individual post an set its privacy level to "5", rather than deleting it.  this allows me to make this post visible in future if i decide that it is no longer too sensitive to publish.  there may be many other reasons why a member might choose to hide a post from others rather than delete it.  it doesn't seem like a complicated tecnological feat to me - why limit users' options? (obviously this option is only applicable for individual posts, not for entire new discussion topics).

         And what is the difference between 1. and 2. in your proposal?

option 1 (lowest privacy level) would allow search engine spiders access to the member's post.  option 2 would block access from search engines, but would allow any non-logged-in users (humans) to view the post.  i have no idea if this is technically possible - i read something on another forum recently that seemed to suggest it is possible, but as you can probably tell, i have very limited knowledge of coding/web dev.  can anyone clarify this?

I was going to reply to this also, but my focus is on a more central issue right now.  I think the answer given is right, with the current system.

I had a look, because I thought that it was possible, in the member’s settings and the group settings to make private individual posts, but there is no post privacy settings.  Besides forums, unlike groups, have no user settable setting anyway.

I won't drag up my views on the forums/groups, but the whole area needs a workout.  Whilst groups/forums are not considered a central feature of this site, I believe for communication, community coherence and collective discussion, they are.  Privacy is most certainly more important and central to any organisation or network, than even the objective mission. Greater user controllable, privacy granularity, is needed, on a per; user, group/forum, thread and even post basis.

It would be nice to just have basics, like, replies inline, rather than chronologically, an inline spell checker, quote css styling, an editor that doesn't lose posts and that doesn't truncate any line with a less-than character '<' upon editing and maybe even a remember me feature.  These ussues and privacy I guarentee has pushed many members away.

JonJon, thanks for raising the issue again.  I had actually written you a really good private message on this, but the ******* system lost it and prompted the A user interface, should NOT distroy data! thread.

bW has a number of things we need to address, but the key one at the moment is simply making a community based decision.  Re-solve that and we take a big step towards solving most of our other problems too.  I think the voluntary developer team are all to aware of most of the issues, which is why we are trying to organise the community better as we have a lot of good developers amongst us, who could be better organised and authorised(by the community) to engage on clear projects.

LnP