Privacy issues in Ubuntu's IRC channels and Launchpad

[Tony Yarusso]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 7:10 PM,  <hatearchives at openmailbox.org> wrote:
> 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.

Since the IRC channels provide user support, and other people may have
the same questions, it is in the community's best interests for those
logs to be searchable, so more people can find the answers they need.
We do however currently exclude the offtopic (non-support) channels
from logging altogether.

> 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...

I'm not sure we even have the technical means of doing this if we
wanted to.  Even if you can prove that you own a particular IRC
handle, you would have to be able to also prove that you were
identified to it at the moment of every message you wish to delete, or
that you had identification enforcement enabled for your nick at the
time.  Those would require some kind of tie-in with Freenode server
logs, which we don't have.  Even if we did, someone would have to
process those requests, and without actual paid staff I doubt that
would be feasible to handle.

While I can appreciate the general sentiment, I don't think this is
something we can reasonably do for the IRC logs.

 - Tony