[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] AUR ToS (aka making AUR user names public)

[Mauro Santos]

On 05-03-2017 13:35, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was recently contacted by a Polish researcher asking for a list of AUR
> account names. I did not expect this to be controversial but a couple of
> Trusted Users raised concerns on IRC, so I decided to move this to the
> public mailing list and discuss the whole topic in generality. I would
> like to head more opinions but please read the whole email and give it a
> second thought before simply bringing up the usual privacy arguments
> mentioned below.
> 
> My original questions was: Are we fine with sharing the list of AUR
> accounts names (only user names, no real names or email addresses) with
> a researcher that seems trustworthy and agrees to not share the data in
> any form other than the resulting anonymized statistics?
> 
> In this particular case, we are talking about Dorota Celinska [1] from
> the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences [2], see [3] for
> a list of her publications and [4] for a summary of her research project
> funded recently by the Polish National Science Centre. She needs the
> list of user names to perform a segmentation analysis, including users
> which were active on the older AUR releases both do not show any
> activity on AUR 4. She would also like to use the user names as
> identifiers to establish connections with other platforms, such as
> GitHub.
> 
> The next question is: Would it make sense to even make this data
> publicly available? Would it make sense to extend our RPC interface such
> that one can search for users names? GitHub, for example, already
> provides such an interface [5]. Let me quickly summarize some arguments
> for this idea which came up on IRC:
> 
> * User names are mostly identifiers. It is questionable whether they
>   can/should be considered personal/private information. Maybe this can
>   only be answered by a lawyer, though.
> 
> * The user names of all accounts with any kind of public activity, like
>   uploading a package, filing a request, writing a comment, are public
>   already.
> 
> * After logging into the aurweb interface, you can already check whether
>   an account with a given user name exists because the account details
>   page URIs have the form https://aur.archlinux.org/account/$username.
>   This means that for any platform providing a list of user names (such
>   as GitHub), you can "establish connections" with the AUR already.
> 
> Now the arguments against:
> 
> * Principle of data economy: We should not share any kind of information
>   we do not need to share.
> 
> * Sharing user names lowers the threshold for sharing other information
>   which is considered more confidential.
> 
> * Users can (and should) already use crawlers to fetch the user names.
>   For example, the user names of all package maintainers and comment
>   authors appear on the package details pages. The names of all users
>   filing package requests appear in the mailing list archives etc.
> 
> * We do not have ToS so we better not share anything.
> 
> I, personally, find the second last argument a very weak one. Telling
> users to build crawlers scraping an brute-forcing our HTML pages makes
> life difficult for both them and us. What do you think?
> 
> On the other side of the coin, the last argument is a very good one and
> it brings me to my last point. Independently of the outcome of this
> discussion, I think we should add some ToS that users need to agree upon
> when registering. It should contain information on liability and on
> privacy. Is anybody willing to write a draft? Do we need the support of
> a lawyer here?
> 
> Thank you for your time and have a nice Sunday!
> 
> Regards,
> Lukas
> 
> [1] http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/dcelinska/en/
> [2] https://www.wne.uw.edu.pl/index.php/en/
> [3] http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/dcelinska/en/pages/publications.html
> [4] https://ncn.gov.pl/sites/default/files/listy-rankingowe/2016-03-15/streszczenia/337724-en.pdf
> [5] https://developer.github.com/v3/users/
> 

I'd say err on the caution side and don't share, even though the
usernames are public and easy to find by scraping them from the
website/mailing list/etc, handing the whole database of usernames in a
silver platter is a whole different story, which is what is being asked.
Is there any community/website that provides a full list of registered
usernames on request?

There is also the question of how useful that data would be, without any
other data such as email the username list is useless, you have no
guarantee that user foo on github is the same person as user foo on the
AUR/Wiki/Forum or user foo somewhere else. In this case I'd also have to
agree that sharing usernames lowers the threshold for sharing other
information.

It also doesn't fit with their stated research goals, only github and
projects associated with scraping data from github are mentioned, why
would they want to throw the AUR usernames in the mix?

-- 
Mauro Santos