[Konversation-devel] [Bug 217889] Konversation spamming personal information by default without user consent

Eike Hein hein at kde.org
Tue Dec 8 18:29:25 CET 2009


https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217889


Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |hein at kde.org




--- Comment #1 from Eike Hein <hein kde org>  2009-12-08 18:29:23 ---
The real name as retrieved from the user's system account settings is not
"dumped into channels when you leave it" -- if that's what happened, then you
probably set that up yourself somehow (if it's a bug, it's not a known one, and
something like that would quickly become apparent in KDE's IRC channels).

That said, the real name is retrieved and written to the Default Identity on
first startup, and when an IRC connection using that identity is attempted, the
name is submitted to the IRC server and can subsequently be read by others
using the "whois" command.

There is a set of assumptions and motivations behind that behavior:
1) System accounts have a Full Name data field precisely to avoid the user
having to re-enter that information redundantly in applications.
2) Being truthful about one's real name is part of established IRC etiquette
(similar to, say, Usenet) -- some networks even have a "network operators may
kill clients using obvious real name forgeries at will" policy.

I think an argument can be made here that if you don't want applications to
make use of real name information you provided the system with, you shouldn't
have entered it.

That said, here's an idea: As submitting a real name to the IRC server is
required by the protocol, we already show error dialogs when attempting to
create a connection with an incomplete identity (e.g. because the system
account had no Full Name set we could retrieve on first startup) or when trying
to save an incomplete identity in the Identity Settings dialog. These dialogs
could try to offer filling in the missing field from the system account. Then
we could leave the real name field empty by default, and give the user this
easy way to opt into retrieving the name from the system account and avoiding
the typing. The Identity Settings dialog itself could also have a button next
to the field for the same purpose.

Complications:
- Getting error dialogs early on certainly makes the first-run experience a lot
less friendly.
- It makes the "incomplete identity" error dialog system a lot more complex. An
identity may be missing multiple required fields, and currently this is handled
with a single dialog showing a list of the fields that need to be edited.
That's at odds with the dialog having a button to automatically fill in the
real name - it doesn't solve the whole problem, so it'd need to loop back to
another dialog with one less complaint in the list. A solution with multiple
dialogs is equally ugly. Not to mention it should check first whether the
system account has a Full Name set to begin with. The alternative is just going
with a button next to the field in the Identity Settings dialog, shown
depending on whether the system account has a Full Name set or not. But that
might be too hard to discover (assuming it's an icon button with a tooltip for
space reasons).

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