[Surfraw-devel] redirectors and privacy

Ian Beckwith ianb at erislabs.net
Tue Jul 12 19:24:06 UTC 2011


Hi,

I was asked in private mail about logging and the redirectors I host
on erislabs.net for the opensearch and wikipedia elvi.

I thought it would be a good idea to make my reply on the list as well:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Short of giving independent auditors root access (er.. no.)  anything
I say has to be taken on trust (which I guess is the same for all
search providers).

I will not disclose any personal details or do anything to monetize
(yuk) any information these scripts get.

I would be tempted to peek at what people are searching for (without
making any attempt to connect those searches to ip numbers or human
beings), but if people think that is out of order I'll happily pledge
not to do that.

The server currently has the standard debian apache setup. As search
parameters are passed in the URL via GET, that means they will be
logged. The scripts don't do any logging beyond that.

If apache supports per-directory logging configuration, I could
anonymise those requests, I'll look into it.. In retrospect I should
have put the search scripts on a subdomain so I can configure them
separately. Maybe I'll do that for the next version.

If anyone wants a copy of the redirector scripts to audit them or host
a private copy, let me know (but beware they are entwined with my
hackish website generation scripts).

Ian.

-- 
Ian Beckwith - ianb at erislabs.net - http://erislabs.net/ianb/
GPG fingerprint: AF6C C0F1 1E74 424B BCD5  4814 40EC C154 A8BA C1EA
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 237 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/surfraw-devel/attachments/20110712/bf5698ac/attachment.pgp>


More information about the Surfraw-devel mailing list