FAQ
Following many comments and contacts by users, we are publishing a list of questions and answers to frequently asked questions or misunderstandings:
Q. What is your motivation behind IRSeek?
A. We believe that there’s a lot of useful information flowing on IRC that is not available to the majority of the users on the Internet. We are building a platform that would change this situation and make this wonderful information widely available to everybody. In a sense, we are creating a knowledge-base different from any other today.
Q. Why not use Opt-in only?
A. We are still considering this alternative and discussing its implications with the community.
Q. Why aren’t you stopping the service until an acceptable solution is found?
A. We have stopped the search functionality and all our bots on December 2nd at about 12:00 UTC.
Q. Why have you used TOR, what are you trying to hide?
A. The reason we’ve used TOR is simply to avoid the IP address limitation on the servers. In retrospect, it was a hasty decision. We should have asked the IRC operators to relax that limitation.
Q. A lot of people have been using various analogies to describe what - in their POV - is the equivalent of IRSeek in the real-life. These include recording conversations in shopping malls, pubs, work/school canteen, ball-rooms, houses, buses, trains, clubs, investigation-rooms and public-parks. What do you think is a proper analogy?
A. We find it somewhat difficult to compare a real-life situation to a chat-room on the net, but we think that the public-park (e.g. hyde-park, Speaker’s corner) analogy is the most appropriate one. People come to the park (public-channel) to be heard (send messages to the channel) and listen to others, anyone can join and leave the park (public-chat room), and you may not know who the people listening/talking are (nicknames on IRC).
Q. Some users have shown concerns that IRSeek may be used to stalk on people on IRC. What is your stand on that?
A. We believe that people whom are interested in stalking others can do it with or without IRSeek. For example, by simply joining a public channel, they can record and archive what is being said in that channel. Furthermore, IRSeek does not log anything except the nickname and the public-message to the channel (no IP addresses, real-names or full-names are logged) so staking to a nickname (that you can’t be sure who is actually behind it) does not seem a major concern to us.
Q. Can you please remove my conversations from your database?
A. Individuals who do not want their nicknames or channels (if they are the contacts - or operators - for that channel) archived (or in our database) will not be archived, and will be removed from our database (essentially an Opt-out feature).
Q. Can you please add our public-channel(s) to your service?
A. We are currently discussing possible solutions with several IRC community leaders and will be happy to add your channel(s) to our service when the issues at hand are resolved.
Q. Can you please anonymize my nick, or please make sure not to anonymize our nicks.
A. We are modifying our system to include an opt-anonymize for every channel. It will be up to the channel contact (or operator) to decide whether to anonymize the nicks in that channel or not.
Q. User’s nick anonymizing is not 100%, sometimes people are writing private information to the channel. How do you address that concern?
A. True, the nick anonymization process is not always perfect. For example, if a person addresses another nickname on the channel with a typo (e.g. addressing “superman” by “supermam”) the process may fail to work properly. The anonymization process is meant to add *another* layer of privacy to the users on the channel, and in the vast majority of cases it does.
Q. Why not let people in the public-channels know you are logging the conversation in that channel?
A. One of the considered adjustments to our service is exactly that.
Tags: community, concern, faq, irseek, resolution
December 10th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Just to address some of the points:
This resource becomes no better than a freeforall wikipedia - no admins, no editing of past comments… Without some sort of way of weeding out useless information and updating for new info (and something inbetween to notify the user of some changes), the resource itself will do more harm than good.
Opt in would further benefit the point made above and as I’ve mentioned in comments in a previous post, because the channel that’s opted-in has determined certain things that would solve many of the issues of irseek as it stands now: 1. logging would be useful as a resource - because this is not something that’s always true for all channels, 2. channel logging issues can be resolved because there is at least one contact that can be a liaison between irseek and channel users (i.e. to remove some revealing/private/NDA/etc. info from logs), and 3. because you have consent from the people involved.
As for the big blob about anonymization, I’d be curious as to how you’d let people opt-out and have all conversations with them in it removed. Some networks have services, but it’s not like you can’t use any nickname you want to say whatever you want. And even though there may be some ways to anonymize nicknames, it might be more confusing as such - imagine a nickname like “god” in a religious channel. And let’s say that nicknames were anonymized (oddly a channel operator only request?) and some participants and their part of the conversation removed? The conversation may make no sense at all. Finally, what happens when personal information is accidentally or unwillingly pasted in a channel? It’s one thing to have nicknames not-anonymized, it’s another to have details like addresses, emails, phone numbers and other information posted for anyone to see. And it happens.
As a result, should you anonymize and remove anything and everything on request, your service becomes utterly useless - and verging on dangerous - until it becomes an opt-in-only service. I’m not trying to sway you towards a “tough, deal with it, you said it in IRC” stance, but rather the opt-in only one. Plenty of services have made themselves useful to many that way - CIA comes to mind - and it’s a lot less controversial.
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