At 1:24 PM -0500 6/20/03, Evan Harris wrote:
> > I would agree that users should be made aware of any possible
privacy risks,
> but most users are already aware that mailer level statistics
are kept, and
> this is just the same thing, just a different format.
That mailer logs are also quite sensitive does not make your records
less sensitive.
The only issue I had with the original statement was the claim that this
method should cause greater concern for privacy. While there are privacy
concerns with any statistics, I wouldn't consider this method any more of a
danger than normal server logs, since nothing is kept that couldn't be found
there.
Evan
FWIW, my original point was that the grey list approach is a greater
cause for concern than a simple white list approach (which can reveal
a user's correspondents but not the date and time of the first and
last e-mail and the number of successful e-mails).
I agree that the grey list approach is not radically more
problematic than mail server logs. But even on that point, having
two places where private info aggregates is worse than having one.
Moreover, the greylist might in some cases be easier to locate or
access -- in some situations, for example a civil litigant might have
fairly direct access to his or her grey list (and thus be easily
required to produce it), but the related mail server logs might be
held by a third party ISP not under the litigant's control. And,
once produced, the greylist can serve as an incomplete but still
useful index into the mail server logs.
By pressing these points, I am not intending to be negative toward
the proposal -- it certainly looks to be worth exploring further.
But, when stacking this up against some of the other ideas and
proposals, I think it is unavoidable that this has greater privacy
implications than some other approaches. Now if it is also
significantly more effective, then greylists may well be worth the
greater privacy risk (and there may be techniques that can reduce the
privacy risks, such as the use of one way hashes of the triplets).
John
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