Who allowed you to get back into the channels with your bots?

Did you ask for permission?

See this: http://www.irseek.com/blog/?p=3#comment-31

You are now banned from Efnet #CSS permanently as far as I’m concerned and will keep an eye out for your future attempts.

Please remove the logs from your site!

Thanks.

-Sarven

Google maps street view is effectively not round-the-clock surveillance as mentioned by mikeash, but what happens with the images taken is that they become available for anyone to see from anywhere. I’m sure you’ve heard of plenty of little gems found in street view - cats, naked people, random people who are surprised to see themselves in the photos… So, it’s not EXACTLY the same as irseek, but the idea is that street view is logging (although only a fraction of a second’s worth) and putting that up online for everyone to see…google’s main source of profit isnt from street view, but irseek’s will be from the multitudes of logs that have been recorded in a very disturbing manner - not the act of logging itself, but rather, the lack of disclosure, the flagrant ignoring of possible network, server and channel rules, and the manner in which it chose to disguise the bots.

So, the fact that other people have been logging IRC channels without consent and published logs on the Internet does not make it (in any way) right. Also, there is a difference between being public IRC and public Web, and your service wants to remove this difference.

When I talk on a public IRC channel I am aware of the users inside it, I am aware my discussion is available to _them_ and not other people. That is important to note, because even if one of them logs it and publishes on the Internet (which is a bad thing to do anyway as I said above) it is at least a an exceptional situation, I can say they are faked logs and such. If however a well established IRC logging site does that the argument that they are fake does not hold much water because the site being popular automatically has more credentials then my words (as opposed to some random user doing it).

So in conclusion:
1. public IRC means you talk to the people on the channel at that moment and not to others
2. if one logs and publishes without consent it is a wrong thing to do but it is an exception and it is very less likely his log will affect me in any way (as it will be by some random user on some random site)
3. if instead there is a well known site that does this then the problem at 2 is amplified 100 times

My point was that some of these analogies are so far off base, they’re not helpful to the conversation. As you may have realized (re your 2nd post), your comparison with Google Street Maps takes the poor “house” analogy further & misconstrues the action. With Google’s one-time snapshot, your house remains private except for a brief fraction of a second, very different from mikeash’s more accurate analogy of “round-the-clock surveillance”. I’m sure if IRSeek’s bots had joined each public channel only once & logged for a second (similar to Google’s actions), likewise, no one would care.

Poor analogies aside, I whole-heartedly agree with you regarding IRSeek’s lack of disclosure. I addressed that in a comment I made previous to the one you responded to, which unfortunately is still waiting moderation (??).

As you said, at public venues where the proceedings are being recorded in some way, that fact is either made clear or is very apparent to the casual observer. That clearly wasn’t occurring in IRSeek’s case & as you pointed out, violated TOS in many cases.

All I mean to say is that a fair number of IRC users are expecting this sort of implied privacy you keep mentioning - that if they felt the need to record a conversation at Starbucks or take a photo in front of our homes, that the person would come up to them and ask to do so.

The implied privacy idea is nice but doesn’t entirely work - unless IRSeeK was logging +p/s channels, which I highly doubt. However, plenty of channels, servers and networks had mentioned something in the TOS about logging, i.e. in the case of the entire Freenode network. This is where most people take offense to what was being done. It’s that rules were flagrantly broken to index and archive ephemeral conversations for the profit of some completely random company.

And I don’t know where you go to, but at plenty of events, conventions and gatherings I’ve been to, you were generally informed in one way or another that “logging” of some sort was going on. Usually a fairly obvious camera, or some notice of some sort, or an announcement. What IRSeeK was doing was tantamount to coming in unannounced with a hidden camera under false pretenses.

Speaking of which, a pretty decent analogy would be what happened at the past Defcon. NBC reporter came in with a hidden camera in her purse trying to out people for the very sleazy Dateline show, lying about who she was and why she was there. So, let’s say you were there and you met a few people and talked to them. It’s one thing if they said they were recording this for some random security-related video podcast. It’s another to chat with someone you’ve never met before (read: this random female at Defcon carrying around this purse trying to talk you into saying too much) and then seeing a recording of your entire conversation detailing some new evil-sounding exploit on Dateline NBC the next week. (Thankfully that didn’t happen…)

Unfortunately, all the options listed in the above blog post are pretty awful. This service should be opt-in. I can see it being of great benefit if it was opt-in and there was a “maintainer” for each channel, adding enough metadata to random conversations to make the logs useful. Otherwise…well…what a headache. Should I be expecting secret channels requiring keys and a registered nickname to join? Frustrating.

Networks I’m an oper on are probably too insignificant and well hidden for irseek to give a *&#% about, but if a bot ever showed up, I’d be glad to gline with record speed.

The problem with your suggestion that the house surveillance concept is flawed…is that there is no implied privacy at all. If there is an implied privacy, what is Google doing with Street View on Google Maps taking photos of streets?