Hi, I have a two questions concerning user privacy.
If i file a bug report on https://bugs.kde.org/ then my email is visible to the public. Shouldn’t our emails only be visible to users who created an account to log into bugs.kde.org?
How much information must you share about yourself for a KDE identity profile and does all data about users stay within the KDE identity ecosystem or is it shared with patrons or other services? I ask this as certain groups e.g. the e.V Group seems to require a lot of personal data including DOB, Address, phone number which for security reasons makes sense but I also want to know that this data is safely stored. Discovering that user emails are publicly available on bugs.kde.org made made me concerned. Other than that. I love what KDE brings to the world and i still have a lot to learn about it.
KDE’s own privacy documents answer both points quite directly - and the answer to the first is unfortunately not what you’d hope:
For the bug tracker, KDE’s general privacy policy states that as an open bug tracking system, your email address and your name, if you provided one, will be made publicly accessible to both logged in and anonymous users. So the address being visible is the documented, intended behavior, not a misconfiguration. Registration requires an email address; the name is optional. Since there is no documented hide-my-email option, the practical mitigation is to register with an address you are comfortable having public.
For KDE Identity, two policies apply. The general privacy policy says Identity profiles are not publicly accessible - with one exception: KDE developers and members of the KDE e.V., whose name and email address are made public. All other profiles are considered private and are only made accessible to sites you log into, and no information is transferred to a service until you log into it for the first time. The KDE Identity privacy policy then describes who can see what inside KDE: the data shared with Identity-enabled sites is your username, full name and primary email address. Members of the e.V. can additionally see each other’s date of birth, home address and phone numbers. The e.V. board can see the name and primary email of all users, for administering the membership, and KDE’s sysadmins can access everything stored in Identity, because that is necessary to operate the service. Neither document lists patrons or sponsors as recipients - the documented sharing is with the sites you choose to log into and the internal groups above.
So in short: bug tracker email = public by design; Identity profile = private unless you are a developer or e.V. member, and date of birth/address/phone only appear in the policies in the context of e.V. membership, where other e.V. members can see them.
For spam protection, this is fine. For privacy, not really, unless you use an email alias. This does not link you to your identity.
I personally use an e-mail alias on the bugtracker, and I feel comfortable with this. The alias is tied to all my other accounts that are used for open-source contributions. Other aliases I use for other purposes. This is the organized and budget-friendly approach to aliases.
I think Protonmail is one of the more expensive ways to get aliases. You get 5 for free, but to get more, the somewhat pricey subscription is needed. If you’re already going to pay for you mail, might as well use Posteo (which is cheaper) and get cheap aliases. And they include 3rd party email client support in every plan, including the 1 euro per month one.
Not to be overly dismissive, and for sure I do read privacy policies and TOS, especially if they are demanding a lot of information, but you should simply assume that everybody and everything you give data to is feeding that up the chain. Most every TOS now has verbiage that says they can update it at anytime, for any reason, and that assumes they aren’t lying in the first place.
In my opinion best practice is give out as little information as possible, and use a service that you find trustworthy for your needs to handle the creation of alias emails. There are a LOT of things we can do to protect our privacy, though nothing is perfect, and by golly gee, they sure are rabid for it. There is a friction vs utility aspect to keep in mind. Just what is your privacy worth? Once you decide that, you can fall down the rabbit hole to exactly your comfort level.
The normie, relatively cheap, and very low friction way, if you are in the iOS sphere, is to use icloud email obfuscation, I forget what it’s called, and it’s what I started with.
Ah I got confused with Proton Pass email aliases, which essentially act as 5 free Proton Mail aliases. They can be generated once and then I never have to use Proton Pass again if I don’t want to. They are suffixed with @passinbox.com. And I just looked on their site, they expanded that to 10, so it seems I was incorrect still, but in a different way.
Nonetheless, I’m still slowly migrating all my accounts to use Posteo aliases, because not only are they more flexible (you can name them anything), it also makes me no longer a freemium customer, which always comes with a risk of enshittification, and Posteo is very ethics-first.
Anyhow this message might have gotten a bit off-topic, I hope it’s okay.