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Toolforge: dewkin exfiltrates personal data
Closed, InvalidPublicSecurity

Description

What is the problem?
Anyone can see the personal daily routine of any Wikipedia-Author. Maintainer doesn't answer to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ricordisamoa#DEep_WiKi_INspector or e-mail.

How can a maintainer recreate the problem?

  1. Go to https://dewkin.toolforge.org
  2. type username and wiki into the interface
  3. Go to "punchcard"

What is your relationship to the Tool?
I'm shown by this tool.

Event Timeline

Habitator_terrae renamed this task from Toolforge: dewkin exfiltrate personal data to Toolforge: dewkin exfiltrates personal data.Jun 6 2021, 10:16 AM
Habitator_terrae added a project: Toolforge.
DannyS712 subscribed.

All of the data shown is based on public info - the punchcard is for times that you made edits, but those are also visible in your contributions history. I don't think this warrants a security task with restricted viewing, and more generally I think this is probably invalid

Aklapper changed the visibility from "Custom Policy" to "Public (No Login Required)".
Aklapper changed the edit policy from "Custom Policy" to "All Users".
Aklapper edited projects, added Tools; removed Toolforge, Security, Security-Team.

I made this ticket public as https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ricordisamoa#DEep_WiKi_INspector is public, and as this is not a software security issue per definition - see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reporting_security_bugs#What_is_Considered_A_Security_Issue

Furthermore, all data displayed by the tool is publicly available.
Anyone could pull such data via https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/API:Main_page and build such a tool (public or not) if wanted.
(Plus statements like "The punch card violates [[:de:WP:ANON]]." are quite misleading - nothing on that wiki page covers this.)

Thank you @Habitator_terrae. I actually read the messages a while ago but decided to get a clearer picture before replying. I believe what you got here is a way more detailed and authoritative answer than I could ever provide.
Anyway, I should add that increasing users' awareness of the amount of data being made public about their behavior and proving the ineffectiveness of 'courtesy' opt-in mechanisms were among the goals that led to the development of the Deep User Inspector (later, Deep Wiki Inspector).
If a piece of software is to blame, that is MediaWiki itself. Should there be a ticket? Found T203826 but nothing specifically asking for restricting access to such data.

@Aklapper To be honest the closing of this issue is less than satisfactory. In 2013 an RFC on meta decided that for the XTools edit counter the same functionality should stay opt in only. The community wishes should be respected.

Do we really need another RFC?

@Count_Count: See the previous comment by Ricordisamoa