Privacy issues in Ubuntu's IRC channels and Launchpad

hatearchives at openmailbox.org hatearchives at openmailbox.org
Sat Sep 21 00:10:29 UTC 2013


Dear community!

I would like to draw your attention to a very important problem.
Both Launchpad and Ubuntu's IRC channel logs does not have any tools to 
request content removal because of privacy reasons.
Problem with Launchpad is that every action you make(adding comment, 
changing bug status) is broadcasted to mailing lists with your private 
e-mail address that is set in your Launchpad account.
Then these 'broadcasts' are Google indexed, mirrored in like 15 other 
mailing archives(some with e-mail in plaintext), but the official one 
*is the only one* without content removal request tool!
When I created my account on Launchpad few years ago, I used my private 
e-mail and my real name. After few years of being active member of 
Launchpad and Ubuntu community, I decided to 'clean my profile' a little 
bit. Googling either my private email/nickname or even real name 
resulted in launchpad email archives and my *really really stupid* 
conversations from IRC logs on first or second page.
I managed to delete my Launchpad 'emails' from nearly every mail 
archive, just not the official one!
Even deleted every single removed link from Google cache.

I tried to contact Canonical employees, unfortunately it looks like 
their @canonical.com e-mails are null-routed or they just don't care.

I am asking for removal request page for Ubuntu archives, and ability to 
delete all your private data that was archived in official e-mail 
archives.

Back to IRC logs; I would like to request that on server containing IRC 
logs archives, robots.txt should be put to block search engines from 
indexing these.
Just like you respect users privacy at paste.ubuntu.com which is NOT 
indexed by search engines, I would like you to respect privacy of Ubuntu 
IRC channels users and mail archives!
Additionally, anyone who can prove that he is an owner of his Freenode 
IRC account should be able to request *complete removal* of everything 
he said on IRC from official Ubuntu logs, including join/leave 
messages...
And yes, there are still users with hostnames like 'JohnDoe-Laptop' or 
their local computer accounts named after their real names!
And a simple join to #ubuntu is enough to get their hostname, ip address 
and real name make into Google-indexed IRC logs forever.

Sincerely,
Long-time Ubuntu community member.



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