The Microsoft verbiage indicates that “country” is one of the terms that can potentially be known to Microsoft. It isn’t meant to suggest that there are circumstances under which, if one’s country is known to Microsoft, that the company can freely divulge it.
After all, the full quote is
Are you suggesting that there might be circumstances under which credit card number would not be considered “personal information”? That’s also listed under information that “may [be] include[d]” under PII.
My intention was to point out Esprix had noted the qualifier and you seemed to have missed it.
While I disagree on the “abuse of moderator privileges” part, you raise as valid a point as did Uncommon Sense. Likewise, my answer is that it won’t happen again, for the reasons mentioned.
In the example, I thought I could divulge IP-based information in such a way that the poster at hand was not “outed” as being from any particular country. Now, while I don’t think I caused sevastopol any real harm, I agree with you and the others objecting that it wasn’t the most prudent thing to, especially not in the wake of the Aldebaran situation.
Given the new, sharper guidelines as pointed out by Ed Zotti, I can assure you it won’t happen again. Not by me, not by any staff member, barring the exceptions stressed.
Actually I think Duke read the passage in context more clearly than I did.
Esprix
I have sent out a couple notes indicating among other things that no private information about individual users to which the mods have access by virtue of their positions is to be publicly revealed, nor are they to publicly say, suggest, etc., that they have looked up or will look up an individual’s info. We do look up numbers from time to time in the course of our work but this info is for internal use only.
The mods’ attention has been drawn to this thread.
We’re currently discussing some fine points raised by the above. Judging from what I have heard everyone understands the seriousness of the issue and I expect no repetitions.
Please understand that the info to which SDMB staff (including me) has access is quite limited - offhand, I’d say IP numbers and e-mail addresses are about it. We don’t know your name, address, and so on. Such credit card-related info as the Chicago Reader retains is held in a separate secure database to which SDMB staff does not have access.
A few final remarks here
It is obvious that Lynn Bodoni does not feel as if she committed any fault. I didn’t see her apologizing nor did I receive an apology on my given mail address.
She hides behind Ed Zotti to post an apology on behave of all the staff.
That can count for all the other members. It does not count enough for me.
Lynn Bodoni can take an example at Coldfire who made a mistake himself yet was most ready to take the responsibility for it and apologized to the member involved.
How some of the participants here can spin things out of context is amazing. How you manage to twist the whole situation to make it appear that the intervention of Lynn Bodoni in a thread where I had a discussion with Coldifre was something I "asked " for… It really deserves congratulations.
Yet the sad truth is that Lyn’ss intervention was as uncalled for as much as the popping up of Mehitabel in a thread that was a discussion between Coldfire and myself. Intended to be between Coldfire and myself as the forum rules state that discussions about moderator decisions or interventions can be settled there.
Mehitabel had no business posting there once again her fantasy-speculation-game about me being a “Saudi”… etc.
If anyone provoked anything, it was this member with her obsession to follow me around. She can’t stop posting that she has puzzled out all by herself my nationality and my country of residence and that everyone should know about that great skill of hers. Disrupting threads with that idiocy whenever she finds me posting somewhere.
So who was provoking who there? And who was led on by who to - completely out of context of the thread and completely uncalled for - “take side” and disclose private information?
Did I invite Mehitabel to once again pop up and spread her nonsense?
Did I invite Lynn Bodoni to feel that she should help the poor innocent stalking Mehitabel with posting private information about one of my proxies? (The fact that she got that completely wrong only proves how eager she was to reveil it.)
Lynn Bodoni clearly deliberately posted that in an attempt to provoke me. That I didn’t reply in that thread was not because she “busted me out”. It was because she couldn’t provoke me, not in the least because of my immediate concerns about what she does with the information she has access to.
An other amazing thing I discovered here is that I see people claim that when I said a year ago once to be at ** that moment** in Belgium, that this must mean that I am permanently in that country. Well I don’t know how you live, but I am lot locked up in a cage that is placed in one room in one single city in one single country on this globe.
Above this: I posted that only to get rid of Mehitabel persisting (already then, and that was at the very beginning of my membership) that I should say “where I live”.
Sorry for all the Mehitabels on this message board, but whatever I ever posted about myself shall never lead you to have a clue about me or my country iof residence. I have my very good reasons to keep my privacy private.
Maybe you can not imagine this to be needed, but you don’t need to imagine anything. You only need to accept the simple truth that my privacy is my privacy and stays my privacy **for MY reason. **
As for the attacks by the administration I received in this thread:
I really thank you very much.
I can understand that you all got a little nervous for me posting this thread, yet you have to thank only yourself for it.
I sent mails to 2 different administrators about this (was that 13 or 15 July, I don’t recall ). I didn’t receive even one single word in response.
So I think I waited long enough to give you all the opportunity to settle this in private and see how to proceed from there on.
Yet instead of appreciating this - there is no rule except of the rule of my own decency and respect that says that I should have mailed you in an attempt to settle this privately - you find it needed to come in this thread to “apologize in the name of …” (no Lynn Bodoni in sight) while attacking me in the same breath.
I even didn’t receive an explanation why you didn’t bother to answer my mail.
Sorry, but the very refusal to even reply on my mails can only confirm to me that you did not take your own rules about privacy even remotely serious.
Salaam. A
I see Aldebaran has been jumping to conclusions, as usual.
Perhaps she doesn’t have access to a computer or if she does, perhaps she has yet to recover enough from her surgery to use it.
Correct.
Wrong. Nobody needs the approval of an OP to post in the OP’s thread.
The best laid plans of mice & men oft go awry. They go awry quite frequently around here; only Staff have the power to keep threads completely on topic.
Have you tried just ignoring her?
Yes, you did. By virtue of starting a thread. Whether or not it was nonsense is unknown to everyone but you.
Why don’t we get her opinion?
If you say so.
Been reading minds again?
You could have let it go without saying anything.
What attacks?
[quote]
I think you’re overestimating your effect here.
Did you put “SDMB” in the message titles? If not, they probably thought it was spam and deleted them without bothering to see what they were.
Aldebaran, if you’ll read the latest sticky, you’ll see that Lynn is on medical leave. I hate to be blunt, but I don’t think that your situation right now is top priority for her. Cut her some slack.
And again-if you e-mail her, put SDMB in your subject line-because the mods get so much spam, they sometimes accidentally delete things.
Don’t assume malice. Just be patient. If you want us to be accepting of you, you’ve got to meet us half-way, mmmkay?
That sticky just showed on the board this evening. The official wrist slap was three days ago. I’d wager she just doesn’t care.
And if she doesn’t good on her. The poor dead horse has been turned to mincemeat by now.
Can I say something in defense of Aldebaran and Lynn both?
Aldebaran is right to feel that his privacy has been violated. His reasons for feeling that way are irrelevant; he didn’t want personal information of any kind revealed, regardless of reason or perceived harm, and that’s what happened. If he doesn’t want his location given away in any manner, giving away which hemisphere he’s in would be a violation of his privacy.
But in Lynn’s defense, that was only clear to me in retrospect. It took a little thinking as to how giving away the country someone was posting in would violate anyone’s sense of privacy. To my knowledge Aldebaran is the only poster who feels that way, and although I’m sure he has his reasons, I can’t for the life of me guess what they would be. You can’t track somebody down just by knowing what country they’re in and what screen name they post under. You just can’t. If you could find someone just because you knew what country they were in, we USers would have tracked down bin Laden by now, as well as most of the FBI’s most wanted list.
So while I can understand that Aldebaran feels violated, I also feel like Lynn probably thought merely discussing what country someone was in wasn’t terribly private, especially in light of the fact that Aldebaran had revealed his own location before.
So everyone take a deep breath and chill, or something.
I take it that you haven’t read many of the posts here. Several people, including moderators, have agreed that this was a violation of privacy and against the rules. Apologies have been made and reform instituted. In the culture that bred The Chicago Reader and SDMB, that is considered an appropriate and wise way to deal with the grievance.
In other cultures perhaps groveling, self-mutiliation, the wearing of horsehair or sackcloth and ashes may be the traditional way to make amends for mistakes. Since I am prone to mistakes myself, I am relieved that the penance is not punitive.
Speaking of mistakes, I find all of the following statements by Aldebaran to be lacking in anything solid to back them up:
No one can ever be certain of the motives of another. Lynn is the only authority on her motives.
No one has claimed that since you were in Belgium a year ago, you must therefore be in Belgium permanently. (We really are a little more logical than that, Aldebaran. I am one of those who mentioned that you were in Belgium. Why should I assume that you are always in Belgium when I am not always in North America? I may have been closer to Belgium lately than you. ;))
Again, you are looking at one possibility only. You have judged their motives for not replying to your email. There are many possible reasons. You have inferred one. The responses by an Administrator and at least one Mod have implied that they do take the issue of privacy seriously.
The choice to believe one or the other is an individual thing. When the choice always seems to be to believe the worst motive, that may reflect more on the person doing the choosing than on the person with the motive.
Why do you give your anger so much attention, Aldebaran?
I did not intentionally forget to add:
Salaam and pax
Ehh, it may not be her top priority now but she’s posted other places on this board today so I’m thinking her medical leave may not be the issue.
Aldebaran, I wouldn’t hold my breath for an apology/excuse for why it was done. If someone is truly sorry, they apologize. Having to ask for one is pretty useless in my opinion. On the other hand, I wouldn’t waste any sleep worrying about it or what people think about it. You know what happened, that’s all that should matter. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. More than a few people have had their eyes open and have a better understanding now of who can be trusted and who cannot.
Huh? I’ve seen this remark before, and it somewhat baffles me. I’m sure it is true for some of my colleagues with -for example- a Hotmail address, but personally, I don’t get much spam at all. I think the request to put “SDMB” in the title mainly stems from moderators who use a service like Hotmail, and have spam filters set up to make sure messages with such titles are not sent into the bin. I don’t think there’s much “accidental deletion” going on.
Personally, my e-mail inbox is never so full that it’s unmanagable - between 10 and 60 messages per day, 90% SDMB-related. I am sometimes a little behind on replying to certain questions, so bear with me. 
I think the reason Lynn never e-mailed Aldebaran a response is that we were still discussing the matter internally. With a lot of moderator on three different continents, it’s a daunting task to discuss an important matter in detail. Add to that that it’s holiday season, and it takes even longer. Aldebaran shouldn’t take the lack of response personally.
True, but I believe Lynn has said more than once to put SDMB in the title if you’re e-mailing her, just in case. Some people’s spam filters are set so that any unknown address gets filtered out.
Just to be on the safe side.
And I agree, he shouldn’t take it personally, nor should he assume the worst.
:smack: Zoe, while we’re on the topic of reading other peoples posts carefully, could you reread mine? Especially the part where I said:
In other words, I’m one of those “several people”. When I say that to my knowledge Aldebaran is the only one who “feels this way,” I mean that he’s the only poster I know of that wishes for his country to remain anonymous, not the only poster who thinks that that should be considered private information.
Sheesh.
Since everyone appears to have said what they’re going to say, and further discussion along these lines is not appropriate to ATMB, I’m closing this thread.