[cfarm-users] privacy

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Sun, 14 Apr 2024 at 20:45, Jonathan Wakely <jwakely.gcc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 14 Apr 2024, 14:05 Bruno Haible, <bruno at clisp.org> wrote:
> >
> > Jonathan Wakely wrote:
> > > > It would not be straightforward to track all SSH access on the farm, both
> > > > for privacy reasons and technical reasons (the farm has very diverse
> > > > systems, and some people run jobs via cron).
> > >
> > > What are the privacy reasons?
> > >
> > > It's a free, public service offered to the community, why should users have
> > > any expectation of being able to use it in secret?
> > >
> > > If you don't want the cfarm admins to be aware of whether or not you are
> > > using the service, you should pay for your own access to another service.
> >
> > While the principles of handling personal information (limiting the purposes,
> > minimizing the data, ...) [1] are legally binding only in the EU, they are
> > good guidelines for helping ensure privacy all over the world.
> >
> > If the compilefarm were to track all SSH access on the farm, taking
> > correlations on the data would, for example:
> >   - reveal whether the accesses are within or outside regular business hours,
> >   - reveal if two persons have nearly the same login/logout times and thus
> >     allow conjectures about their relationship.
> >
> > The stated purpose in this thread is to detect "long-dormant users".
> > Tracking all SSH accesses would produce more data than needed for the
> > purpose — which goes against the principle of data minimization.
>
>
> There no need for "tracking all ssh access" (that was just what
> Baptiste said). It would be enough to just keep a record of whether a
> user has logged in at all in the past 6 months, with a resolution of a
> day if you're concerned about recording the hours anybody uses. I'm
> sure the system logs already show when somebody logs in, so the
> information you're concerned about already exists.
>
> [jwakely at gcc2-power8 ~]$ /usr/bin/last | grep haible
> haible   pts/0        176.199.253.237  Fri Apr  5 13:36 - 13:36  (00:00)
>
> Is this a problem?

That info is already available to anybody with cfarm access. Recording
"how user jwakely logged in in the past approximately 180 days" as
root doesn't seem any worse.


>
>
> >
> > Other approaches (such as getting the 'atime' of the ~user/.ssh/* files
> > once a year) would produce less data. But it was not what was discussed
> > in the sourceware.org thread and replied-to by Baptiste.
> >
> > Bruno
> >
> > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation#Principles_and_lawful_purposes
> >
> >
> >