[Development] PSA: Qt Project IRC logs & statistics

[Alan Alpert]

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 11:56 AM, André Pönitz
<andre.poenitz at mathematik.tu-chemnitz.de> wrote:
> On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 03:27:06PM +0200, Mitch Curtis wrote:
>> On 05/02/2013 12:45 PM, Knoll Lars wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I've received some concerns about privacy regarding the IRC logs. The
>> > main concern was about join/leave messages showing exact times as well
>> > as IP addresses of the people joining and leaving. In addition, some
>> > people feel uncomfortable that whatever they say on IRC basically stays
>> > around forever.
>> >
>> > I understand these concerns and I think it's a good idea if we discuss
>> > this here, and hopefully come to a common policy about this for
>> > qt-project.org.
>> >
>> > Thanks, Lars
>> >
>>
>> Can't anyone collect this information with their own IRC client though?
>
> The question is not whether it is technically possible for some individual
> to collect and retain personal data of Qt users by logging IRC traffic but
> whether the Qt Project officially endorses or, worse, actively participates
> in such practices.
>
> >From my point of view the only possible answer is clearly "No."

This issue has already been covered by the relevant IRC experts,
http://freenode.net/channel_guidelines.shtml (last point on that
page), so we don't need to keep reframing the question from first
principles here.

Given those guidelines, our possible answers are either "No (i.e.
there is no permission given for public logging)" or "list it in the
channel topic for logged channels (and possibly leave some channels
deliberately unlogged)".

I'm personally in favor of the latter, because the free flow of
information is generally useful to open projects (and this is *not*
sensitive personal data).

--
Alan Alpert