[Cialug] I Don't Hate Tikly--a Thoughtful Side-Topic Opinion

[Matt Stanton]

I was just working with the problem posed being that you wanted to get a general head count for an event, that you wanted to avoid accidental duplication of "heads", and that you didn't want any of the saved data to get traced back to any real information.  This would be a system that is at least somewhat "trustable" to those signing up, even if the table lives on in some forgotten database somewhere by accident.

If you want an actual list of attending members, then that is different, and it is up to those attending to trust the organization collecting the information.  Anyone attending a meeting announced on the LUG list already trusts the LUG, since they have posted their email addresses to the mailing list's database, and most people identify themselves by name in their email headers, if not their signature.  The only additional information "gathered" on a LUG member RSVPing to an event is that they are going to be in a particular place for a set amount of time (or less if they leave early).

The problem with using facebook or tikly or eventbright is that you are giving this information to an untrusted organization that had none of the orignal information to begin with.  They are getting free data that can be used or sold in unforseen ways in return for a single number or a list of names.

If the LUG sets up a list, it doesn't matter to me what data is stored.  I didn't even really mind so much having to respond to an eventbright URL, but others seemed to want to avoid giving away data for free.  I went to the extreme in my proposed method by accident. :)

-- Matt (N0BOX)

P.S.- Props to Ken for the suggestion of a random event code to be used as a salt for the hashing of data.  This is why I leave crypto up to the experts... I never would have thought of that.

Sent from my ASUS Transformer

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Yates <Scott at yatesframe.com>
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
Sent: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 11:20 AM
Subject: Re: [Cialug] I Don't Hate Tikly--a Thoughtful Side-Topic Opinion

I think Jim's point is more that, in a LOT of cases, your data sits in a
database somewhere when it really does not need to.

In the RSVP case, it would seem the most important info to get is a head
count.  That seems an ideal situation for the hash, count and drop table
scenario.

This idea that free pizza or the like should be an excuse for
companies/people to expect data seems wrong to me.

This said, services that provide inordinate value to me -such as gmail- I
have a more tolerant view towards.  Whether or not this SHOULD be the case,
I leave up for discussion.

Just my 2¢

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Nicolai <nicolai-cialug at chocolatine.org>wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 09:00:28AM -0600, David Champion wrote:
> > I agree, Todd. If I'm providing something to you at no cost - pizza,
> > running a mailing list or forum, etc. and you can't even tell me your
> real
> > name and email address, then please do not expect to get anything from me
> > in return.
>
> Yeah.  If the group itself does the head-count, then getting a list of
> hashes is kinda weird.  Besides that hashing is just hand-waving in this
> context anyway.
>
> Who is collecting the data?  I think that matters more than the data
> itself.
>
> Nicolai
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> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug at cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
>
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