>
> Including more information on the UA, while being covered by legal under
> the new privacy policy, really goes agains the wishes of the community as
> they do not wish to be finger printed.


I don't think that "the wishes of the community" have been established and
the whole point of checkuser is that it allows for fingerprinting.


On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 4:20 AM, Nuria Ruiz <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> >As a checkuser, user agents are an important part of my workflow for
> identifying that multiple accounts are owned by the same person.
> > So I'm going to have to argue for including more information in the user
> agent.
>
>  Including more information on the UA, while being covered by legal under
> the new privacy policy, really goes agains the wishes of the community as
> they do not wish to be finger printed.
> See:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:EventLogging/UserAgentSanitization or
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Privacy_policy
> There has been plenty more discussions about this on analytics e-mail list.
>
>
> >Your proposed user agent would basically mean that every single person
> using the most up-to-date version of the app on a particular platform would
> >be indistinguishable from each other. This would, unfortunately, lead to
> lots of innocent users getting blocked as sockpuppets.
>
> However, note that the UA " WikipediaApp/<version>
> <OS>/<form-factor>/<version>" clearly satisfies the use case of the mobile
> team. It provides as much information as they need from their user without
> sending any private data.
>
> Can you please list what is your use case? Namely how are you identifying
> "false" accounts. Perhaps relying on the user agent to do so is not the
> best strategy going forward. Have in mind that with the old privacy policy
> UA data needed to be discarded after 90 days. With the new policy there is
> more legal room but given community feedback analytics team is planning
> on aggregating all UA information in the future. This means that UA data
> will not be stored (or reported) per user or request but rather agreggated
> (as in "4% of users use iPhone").
>
> We gathered recently information from all teams as to use cases pertaining
> UA data collection:
>
> https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Internal/EventLogging/PrivateData#Use_Cases_for_User_Agent_collection
> .
>
> Let's talk about your use case and add it to the document that already
> exists describing usages of user agent data, this document was sent out to
> all teams couple months ago but there is no description of your use case
> there:
>
> https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/document/d/1bp6qrvYi0Mh7l0s1psGnXEENWhmUfcKi1k1TbcozgeA/edit
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:20 PM, Dan Garry <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hey Yuvi,
>>
>> As a checkuser, user agents are an important part of my workflow for
>> identifying that multiple accounts are owned by the same person. So I'm
>> going to have to argue for including more information in the user agent.
>> Your proposed user agent would basically mean that every single person
>> using the most up-to-date version of the app on a particular platform would
>> be indistinguishable from each other. This would, unfortunately, lead to
>> lots of innocent users getting blocked as sockpuppets.
>>
>> Here's an example of a user agent from an iPhone using Safari:
>> Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; zh-tw)
>> AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4
>> Safari/6533.18.5
>>
>> Look at all of that wonderful information! ;-) In general, the more
>> information you can include without breaching the user's privacy, the
>> better.
>>
>> I'd be happy to work with you on this.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dan
>>
>> P.S. You may also want to consult with the legal team, to ensure that an
>> unacceptable levels of private information are not given out. They would
>> also make a complement for me; I would likely be pulling in the direction
>> of "MOAR INFORMATION!", whereas they would likely be pulling in the
>> direction of "LESS INFORMATION!". :-)
>>
>>
>> On 26 March 2014 15:00, Yuvi Panda <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Add Analytics to cc, as I think they'll be interested as well :)
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Yuvi Panda <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> > Hello!
>>> >
>>> > We are getting closer to a general release of the Wikipedia Android
>>> > and iOS apps, and I think we should standardize on a User-Agent
>>> > format. The old app just appended an identifier in front of the
>>> > phone's default UA[1] but I think we can do better, to avoid privacy
>>> > concerns[2].
>>> >
>>> > How about:
>>> >
>>> > WikipediaApp/<version> <OS>/<form-factor>/<version>
>>> >
>>> > This gives us all the info we need (App version, OS, Form Factor
>>> > (Tablet / Phone) and OS version) without giving away too much. It is
>>> > also fairly simple to construct and parse.
>>> >
>>> > For the latest alpha, my Nexus 4 would generate
>>> >
>>> > WikipediaApp/32 Android/Phone/4.4
>>> >
>>> > While an iOS device might generate
>>> >
>>> > WkipediaApp/2.0 iOS/Phone/7.1
>>> >
>>> > form-factor would just be Phone|Tablet for now, and can be expanded
>>> > later if necessary.
>>> >
>>> > Thoughts?
>>> >
>>> > [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile/User_agents#Apps
>>> > [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EventLogging/UserAgentSanitization
>>> > --
>>> > Yuvi Panda T
>>> > http://yuvi.in/blog
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Yuvi Panda T
>>> http://yuvi.in/blog
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Analytics mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dan Garry
>> Associate Product Manager for Platform
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Analytics mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>
>>
>
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>
>
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