Privacy Digest

It seems that they have deactivated their search interface for now. Hopefully they are working with the community to try and find a less intrusive way to do this. If it was opt-in(with notification) and users could exclude their nicks from archiving, a lot of people would not be protesting so hard.

• I also have found what appears to be a screengrab from an IRseek search session. It's over on Flickr, and only a single screen, but it shows you what their search results page looks like. I would have included it but it was copyrighted with "All rights reserved".
• If you speak German there is a wiki being put together on IRseek at http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/IRSeeK or you can try the Google translate function
• One of the senior people over in the Drupal world contacted them directly and made a blog post about it. One of the things mentioned was "The #irseek-victims channel keeps a wiki" Its the one in German mentioned above
• The staff at FreeNode blogs about Logging
  

  After this recent article on techcrunch.com many of our users have contacted freenode staff to express their concern, shock, surprise and unease that IRseeK have for some time now been operating covert clients in various channels on freenode (and other IRC Networks) logging all communication and publishing it on their website.

  We, freenode staff, are also surprised, not to mention rather upset, that this company has chosen to completely ignore our policies and perform actions which our users see as an invasion of their privacy. While we have contacted B & C Advanced Solutions, the company behind IRseeK, to request that they discontinue unauthorized logging on freenode and also that they remove any published logs, we have unfortunately had to take the additional step of blocking new tor connections while we pursue the matter further. The logging bots primarily connect through tor, seem to have no distinguishing characteristics that we can identify, and so far the company has not been willing to remove them voluntarily. We are currently removing the bots as we see them, and if you do spot a client you believe may be a IRseeK logging bot, please do let staff know and they will look into whether the client needs to be removed from the network. To all legitimate tor users out there, I apologise for the inconvenience caused and hope to have normal service restored as soon as possible.

  Our website clearly states our policies on this topic, which have been published for several years. For those who haven’t read them recently, I quote one of the relevant sections:

  “If you’re considering publishing channel logs, think it through. The freenode network is an interactive environment. Even on public channels, most users don’t weigh their comments with the idea that they’ll be enshrined in perpetuity. For that reason, few participants publish logs.

  If you’re publishing logs on an ongoing basis, your channel topic should reflect that fact. Be sure to provide a way for users to make comments without logging, and get permission from the channel owners before you start. If you’re thinking of “anonymizing” your logs (removing information that identifies the specific users), be aware that it’s difficult to do it well—replies and general context often provide identifying information which is hard to filter.

  If you just want to publish a single conversation, be careful to get permission from each participant. Provide as much context as you can. Avoid the temptation to publish or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own. “

  And this perhaps, is where I feel that IRseeK has gone horribly wrong. I believe that this could have become a popular service had it been done in a way which promotes choice — operating on an opt-in basis could very well have meant that a lot of channel owners would have chosen to request an IRseeK logging bot in their channel so that logs could be referenced and looked at later.

  However, currently there is no way to opt-in, or even to opt out. The bots aren’t easily identifiable and you’re not aware that they are present in your channel. Ideally, I would have liked to see:

  Goto the FreeNode blog for the rest ...

• IRseek was first mentioned on DIGG over 260 days ago.