On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 05:38:37PM +0000, Paul Smith wrote:
The fact is that most people do not really care about privacy! Them
volunteering to send me their credit card statements proves that.
Hiding IP addresses pales into insignificance alongside that.
While it's true that many people are quite clueless when it comes to
email security, I don't think that is a reason not to remove privacy
sensitive information that may not be needed.
But that's exactly the problem - there's no way to tell whether or not
it will be needed. And the uses for which it is needed include some
that can assist users in maintaining their privacy.
The fact that many people
quite happily enter personal information on random websites, hasn't
stopped many bigger and smaller sites from serving content over HTTPS.
For this to be a sensible comparison to the inclusion/omission of IP
information in Received: fields the use of HTTPS would have to have some
deleterious consequences. Those consequences are ... what, exactly?
Like it or not, there are privacy tradeoffs in the decision to include or omit
this information. The continued refusal to acknowledge that these tradeoffs
exist has us all circling around and around and is making it impossible to
move forward in this discussion.
Moreover, my ideal outcome isn't one where an IETF [WRE]G tells email
providers all over the world which bits to remove. If anything, I think
email is far too established for the IETF to have this kind of
influence.
I don't think anyone is proposing that the IETF do anything like this. The
current charter text and draft are both deeply flawed, but neither of them do
this.
What we can do is guide email providers who want to remove privacy
sensitive information, for reasons that we may or may not agree with, to
do it in a way that doesn't harm our ability to fight other kinds of
abuse. I still think that's possible.
I started out in this discussion by expressing the belief that redacting IP
address from Received: fields during submission was a good idea and redaction in
other contexts was not [1].
But not only has the discussion so far failed to provide the strong support for
my original belief that I expected would emerge, it has shown me that there's a
much stronger case for retaining the information that I previously thought.
Ned
[1] http://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/perpass/olIpnc_N1Vu46k0X_Rc74XMlYZE
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