[liberationtech] Please Vote on "Reply to" Question

[R. Jason Cronk]

Can I vote reply-to-null? That would prevent all mishaps.

Seriously though, this presents an interesting display of the trade-offs 
between privacy risks and convenience of use.  Given that the purpose of 
the list is to perpetuate an ongoing discussion, the convenience of 
replying to the entire list seems to outweigh the risk of revealing 
private information.  Optimally, the from header should say 
liberationtech with a inline note at the top identifying the author is. 
This would reduce (though not eliminate) the risk of someone 
misidentifying the intended recipient of their reply. I don't think the 
list software supports such configuration though.

Just as a point of analysis, I've seen distribution lists that were 
intended to be one way (i.e. a few authorized individuals may send out 
messages) but were configured wrong such that replies not only were sent 
to the list, but the list allowed anybody, not just authorized 
individuals, to post. Contextually, this is much different, and the 
analysis would weigh in favor of making such a list reply to sender, not 
reply to all.  However, in those cases, the problem results from a 
misconfiguration not a failure to weight the risks.

My vote reply-to-list.


*R. Jason Cronk, Esq., CIPP/US*
/Privacy Engineering Consultant/, *Enterprivacy Consulting Group* 
<enterprivacy.com>

  * phone: (828) 4RJCESQ
  * twitter: @privacymaverick.com
  * blog: http://blog.privacymaverick.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20130322/c55be909/attachment.html>