Re: IETF Slack workspace

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-08-27, at 20:55, Rich Kulawiec <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> What assurances do we have about what ???Slack, inc.??? will (or will not) do with these email addresses?
> 
> The answer is "none whatsoever”

Yes.

This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that active participation in the IETF already makes public the mail address you use for that (mail archive, “author’s addresses” in the draft), so I don’t see a lot of downside to giving them out directly to another entity.

In the computer science/math department of the university, we are very careful about forcing the students into handing out PII to third parties (*), so we run our own mail, seafile, IaaS, LMS, gitlab, hackmd, mattermost, rocket-chat, etc (partially departmental, partially in the computer center).  (The university as a whole seems to be less shy about this, but that is a different issue.)  In the IETF, transparency issues may make those privacy issues mostly moot, more so than we probably would like it to be.

Grüße, Carsten

(*) Note that any third party can (and quite likely will) go evil if it goes bankrupt.  I don’t think our legal department knows why you’d want to have bankruptcy clauses in any self-respecting contract, and we wouldn’t get those from the commodity services anyway.