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The privacy aspect to this is definitely touchy: > The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible w
by EndXA 6y ago
The privacy aspect to this is definitely touchy:
> The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” And while [Judge Schofield] didn’t entirely disagree, she said the agency had failed to adequately spell out how anyone would be harmed by the disclosure.
> Regardless, Schofield said she also decided to weigh any hypothetical harm against the potential value of the information to the public. “In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great,” she said, adding: “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed.”
The judge also wrote that:
> ...despite the privacy concerns raised by the agency, releasing the logs may help clarify whether fraudulent activity interfered with the comment period, as well as whether the agency’s decision-making process is “vulnerable to corruption.”
- rasengan 6y agoWhat’s crazy is if you own the ISP (who generally wants to repeal net neutrality) you already know which names are associated with each IP as well as other information since you looked up their credit score among other things.
- warent 6y agoThis is really great news and I admire the judge's dedication to truth and justice. It makes me wonder how much pressure the judge recieved behind-the-scenes before making this ruling. Excited to see how this develops. Unfortunately I suspect the answer is probably more mundane than anything; e.g. the comments were from a botnet which the FCC lacks technical competence to deal with.
- elliekelly 6y agoI’m a bit confused about the privacy issue here. Isn’t the (alleged) commenter’s full name and address published along with their comment in the public filing? If the commenter’s address is already published what other information can be gleaned from their IP address? Is the fear that someone could use it to piece together a person’s web history?
- henryfjordan 6y agoThe New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. Gizmodo failed to link to the actual opinion with this info: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york-times-company-v-federal-communications-commission/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york... Edit: upon reading more, now I'm not sure if the NYT already has the names and addresses and is just seeking the metadata or if they don't need that data to do their analysis. Your guess might have been right, the ruling is unclear.
- deathanatos 6y ago> The New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. The point of the person you're responding to is that the NYT doesn't need to seek names or addresses, because they're already public information. Anyone can go look up the docket and see them[1]. So, their argument I believe is that, given that the names and addresses of the filers of comments are already publicly available, what further privacy concern is there in releasing IP address information? And there might be one. IP address & UA might further allow me to correlate the user's activity elsewhere; some comments didn't submit names or addresses — IIRC these were "required" but some people filled in the fields with things like "none". There were also allegations that the names of some comments were falsified on comments not in favor of net neutrality. IP address information might lend evidence to or against those allegations. [1]: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC&submissiontype_description=COMMENT https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-...
- henryfjordan 6y agoI did not realize it was that easy to see the comments. That answers that question. Thanks for that link.
- awful 6y agoExactly; I was on that list and looked at the db during the intial controversy. I looked up some of my neighbours, and it was clear to me they had no obvious connection to the issue, and had in fact very similar or exact things to say, as I recall. I took it at the time to mean they had gave someone a proxy to speak for them, maybe some business or political group.
- crocodiletears 6y agoWould a good middle ground would be add some salt to each unique IP, hash the addresses, and hand hashed data over?
- nightfly 6y agoIt would make the ip address information useless. What they probably want to do is figure out how many comments came from the same network blocks that were allocated to organizations (to detect large numbers of fake comments). If you hash the ip addresses you can't figure out which ones came from the same network allocation, the most you could do is figure out which comments came from identical ip addresses.
- crocodiletears 6y agoTrue. Bar assigning each hashed ip a block id, the data would be pretty useless. Even then you might still lose out on some important metadata.