[128375] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Question of privacy with reassigned resources
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Bellovin)
Thu Aug 5 06:00:04 2010
From: Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTin33-hd0Bx6uiFrUMJRphb6HuCL2Ls-P7U7A51g@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 10:25:00 +0200
To: William Herrin <bill@herrin.us>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Aug 4, 2010, at 11:49 42PM, William Herrin wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> =
wrote:
>> On Aug 4, 2010, at 1:35 17AM, William Herrin wrote:
>>> For the latter, you're providing significant amounts of a public
>>> resource (IP addresses) to a business whose contact information =
you're
>>> contractually and ethically obligated to reveal. If a particular
>>> complex is worried about publishing their location, they can always
>>> rent a P.O. box. If you're the only one doing the worrying, don't.
>>=20
>> I strongly disagree -- you're revealing the precise address of any
>> tenant in those buildings. Don't do that...
>=20
> Then discuss it with the apartment complex, Steven, and encourage them
> to get a PO box to use in place of their physical address. Or just buy
> a box from mail boxes etc. yourself and set up mail forwarding each
> time you set up a new apartment complex. The main point of the
> exercise is that the address consumer (the apartment management
> company, a for-profit business) be identifiable and directly reachable
> by phone, email and postal mail, not that they provide accurate
> coordinates for targeting the nukes. Plenty of reasonable ways to meet
> the spirit of the rules. The letter too.
>=20
Clearly, the apartment complex owners could do that if they so choose. =
I'm not sure who you suggest should "buy a box from mail boxes etc. =
yourself and set up mail forwarding each time you set up a new apartment =
complex" -- the ISP? How does that help? This is, as you say, a way to =
contact the apartment complex owners, right?=20
The issues have to do with knowledge and expenditure. For the most =
part, consumers and apartment complex owners have no knowledge of IP =
geolocation or SWIP. It is consumer privacy at risk here, but consumers =
have no opportunity to opt out of this scheme even if they knew about =
it. "Discuss it with the apartment complex" is generally null advice; =
apart from the fact that consumers have exactly zero leverage in many =
markets, the apartment managers (a) don't know about it, either, and (b) =
can't be bothered to get a PO box and collect the (rare) mail from it.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
