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

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 15:18:43 +0100, Martin Kühne via arch-general wrote:
>On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 3:01 PM, Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com>
>wrote:
>> Much likely nothing bad
>> would happen by handing out a list, but to avoid a "Now, why didn't I
>> think of that?"-issue the easiest solution seems to reject such
>> requests in general, at least as long as it's not obviously that the
>> research is "good" (what ever this means) for the Arch community
>> and/or human kind or the universe in general.  
>
>
>So you're admitting that you can't come up with a real concern and are
>opposing just for the sake of opposing.

Wrong! Protection of privacy is something that requires much thinking
and much weighting. Abstract imagination of issues is reason enough to
deny such a request, as long as the researcher doesn't plausibly
explains the benefit of the research. If somebody wants to hand out
the requested data, this person should provide more easy to understand
information, that isn't too long to read.

On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 15:07:53 +0100, Henrik Danielsson wrote:
>I also doubt we'll find some drastically new improved way of life
>because of this, but not all research aims for that.
>Satisfying curiosity would be enough reason for most research IMHO.
>Learning there is nothing there is also learning.

Curiosity about what? How many equal nicknames were used on AUR and
github and what kind of software is related to those nicknames? A
researcher is seriously interested in this information? Not in
something else?

How do you know that this research is about learning something
positive?

We, the Internet and/or phone home app users already suffer from much
misused data. It's reasonable to be sceptic in regards to protection of
privacy.

Has got somebody the slightest idea about the aim of this research?

"anonymized statistics" and "establish connections" are abstract
phrases. Not abstract is that those claims are contradictory, without
the need of much abstract concerns or paranoia.

In the end I don't care, since I more or less have given up that
nowadays people are interested in really thinking about protection of
privacy, hence I'll op out, I only wanted to point out my doubts. Done.

Regards,
Ralf