On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 11:39:33 +0100, Martin Kühne via arch-general wrote:
I know it's not directly an privacy issue, but I find it scary nonetheless... (especially since they expressed the wish to consolidate the data with other websites such as github).
This is exactly for the argument I was struggling to come up with. As far as I followed the discussion, this was the first time (I realized?) someone clearly disconnected the argument from the privacy discussion. Put this way, it makes sense to me, too. For the practical implications we'd hand over along, with a note of "do whatever you want with it we don't care". Turns out we do care what someone else does with the data.
This doesn't disconnect it from the privacy reasoning, this is a privacy issue, too. On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 11:26:25 +0100, Guus Snijders via arch-general wrote:
It's not that the information cannot be obtained otherwise, but I believe it makes a legal difference.
This is the whole point. It makes a difference to explicitly provide a lists under somebodies responsibility, that is isolated from the individual responsibility of the individual user and by doing this quasi to allow to use the lists for information processing. It's not allowed to download and misuse a photo that is published by a homepage. The photo is accessible for everybody, but not necessarily free for usage. Usernames are readable for everybody, but this doesn't implicate that it's allowed to use the usernames for information processing, it might also not be forbidden, it's just important, that the responsibility to have a username is by the user and to collect and process the data by the "researcher" and not by a third party providing a list.