I do appreciate you position and BB’s lack of warning or opt-out IS seriously questionable. But privacy policies are just quasi-contractual instruments to protect the quotidian net user from their own ignorance. For people that know how the net works it seems a better policy to be defensive in general and to not trust people you hardly know. For me I never expect any system to do the right thing 100% of the time, especially when humans are involved at any stage. FWIW privacy policies are good and necessary and should not be broken freely as that only alienates people but here in the real world it should be known that people don’t always act the way you would like them to, in my experience people rarely act the way I would like them to and as such I always hope for the best but plan for the worst.

The contractor for website functionality thing sounds acceptable as an exception (as long as Disqus had to sign an NDA to accept the contract — otherwise, not really). But yeah it really needs to be written into the actual policy.

Thanks for the response. You might want to make the language in the privacy policy more clear then. However, Disqus’ privacy policy states that they can take personal information (e-mail addresses being one of the things they define as such) supplied to them and give to third parties for marketing purposes. That falls under my definition of spamming. Did you review their privacy policy before contracting them or have a discussion about how they use the content stored on their system?

I also continue to feel that you should have brought up the site changes with the BB userbase beforehand and given an option to delete accounts that didn’t wish their information on Disqus. That would’ve been a BB thing to do — honest, open communication. But the attitude I’m feeling continues to be a bit cavalier towards privacy and dismissive towards your users.

All that said, I am a little disturbed with all of this hoopla, it does indeed seem to go against the tenets of BB.

Surely the aneurism is imminent.

And what the f’n hell is up with this comment box? After every CR it tries to add a ‘sort of’ random users name ahead of the initial  ‘@’ and when I type an ‘@’ the list of seemingly random users pops up below the box. Going to attach the snip for any interested folks/mods.

so I’m just now wrapping my head around what really happened here.  BB decided to publish with WP.  To manage comments, they chose WP add-on Disqus.  I have to join Disqus to comment on BB (boo!) which de-facto means that I have joined WP (boo!) and now I have to learn how to manage a WP profile and dashboard so I can do something that I never had to even think about before.  What’s next?  solving differential calculus captchas to post?

I come here to relax after work, and I usually have a healthy buzz on.  I’m not really trying to do more work.  I wasn’t trying to join WP, either, and not with the email I used for BB, but too late now.

Thanks for the confusion, appreciate the heads-up, team!

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to this issue. The most unfortunate issue doesn’t have much to do with Disqus per se, but BB’s violation of the privacy policy and their complete lack of forewarning of this action. I see the point you’re trying to make: that if I wasn’t incensed that MT was given a copy of the DB, why should I make a fuss about Disqus? Well, although arguably yes you’re both in the business of making tools for sites, MT is focused on the architectural side, while you’re focused on the content side. And that puts a different light on what your intentions are with the content you are given.

MT was given a copy of the DB for technical reasons, so Rob explained. This seems fairly reasonable. You were given all of our e-mail addresses for a reason unknown to me. This does not seem like information you should need or have. Usernames, yes. E-mail addresses, no. Perhaps this is an issue of data being scraped with too wide a net.

I had been to your site before, but just went again. I had to use ghostery to bypass your account registration popup initiated by the all-seeing eye of your Disqus cookie. If you’re trying to garner trust, the site seems a bit forceful right off the bat. Even when not logged into Disqus, the site feels very B2B-centric and a bit sterile. So I don’t get a warm feeling that says, “hey denizens of the internet, trust the sites you’re visiting to trust us to keep your social media safe on our platform.” I don’t see assurances front and center about our privacy. Digging down to the privacy policy, I then see this passage in How We Use Personal Information: “(iv) to provide you with information and offers from us or third parties that we believe you may find useful or interesting, including newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information on services and products offered by us or third parties.” Well, that’s not very reassuring at all, Daniel! Without more specific information, I can only take that to mean that our e-mail addresses are now ripe for being put on spam marketing lists, or who knows what else. How deep does the rabbit hole go? Surely you can understand how this looks.

So how can things go forward in a positive manner in terms of changes Disqus can make? Priority one would be a revision of the privacy policy to (iv). Priority two would be to reevaluate how you’re ingesting site DB data into your system, and make sure personal info is stripped out. I haven’t looked into this import process, so I can’t really speak here, aside from the fact that our e-mails were sent to you without permission and that shouldn’t have happened. Priority three would involve making it much more clear on your site how user content is used by you, who owns it, what rights you are claiming on it, and why users should trust Disqus with personal information and their public content. I guess you’ve put most of your efforts into building relationships with site owners, but you need a lot more work on the user side. If other people want to chime in here, please do. I’m probably missing things.

An equally important question is, how can things with BoingBoing go forward in a positive manner? BB’s response to the privacy violation has been lackluster to say the least. In fact, since I called them out on it, they haven’t said a word. This really disappoints and confuses me. I would really like Cory to respond, apologize, and lay out a plan with you to rectify the privacy violation. Hopefully you aren’t using our e-mail addresses in a meaningful way within your system and the addresses can be deleted from your DB. That would be a best-case plan.

Well, I think I’ve given you (and BB, if they care) enough to chew on. Thanks for listening.

Also, I’m possibly daft, but where is this admin bar?  My page never finishes loading (Safari on Mac), so maybe that’s the last part that normally loads.  All I see is an option to be notified by email (which also doesn’t work).

Yeah, Disqus is a third party. But above all else, we’re providing a software solution that this website is using. Just like MT, we are in the business of creating trust through our tools — trust for the websites and for its users. If users don’t trust using Disqus, the websites won’t want to use it.

We place a high bar for privacy concerns (we don’t use your emails for anything but to provide this service) and our software is used on sites from boingboing to CNN to Al Jazeera to President Obama’s campaign website. It’s good to be concerned about privacy on the web; that’s why we’re happy to be very strict about our privacy policy.

I can even go into more detail about anything you want to hone in on. Building Disqus on the web requires a lot of trust from all participants, so we’ll continue to learn about what is unclear to people and what we need to improve over time.

Do you mind me asking what you find non-secure about our password reset? (http://disqus.com/forgot)

- Ben

I DID find a setting to change the date/time from relative to absolute.  Click on “edit profile”. Select the Account tab, the change your date/time display from relative to absolute, and save it.  It won’t be site specific, but oh well.

But turning on threading here (or at least allowing it be set, I know I’ve seen other Disqus sites with threading, so it has to be able to be done) might help.

lose the stupid banner with my profile on it

Click on your name, select “Edit my profile”, and untick “Show Admin Bar when viewing site”

Wait… are Offworld and BB Gadgets dead? I can’t even find the websites for them now.

Something to consider, the pulldown box for post ordering really can confuse things. I inadvertently set it to ‘popular now’ and was royally confused for a couple of minutes as everything was out of order. It follows that when/if we get post numbers back or date/time stamps that could make things a little clearer. FWIW I won’t be using that ‘feature’ in the future. Keep up the good work.

Edit: Did we just get threaded comments as well? Going to f5 to confirm.

Reedit: Nope, just dropped it to the bottom. Either way.

Again: oops, ‘load more comments’ does the right thing, ‘X new comment was just posted. Show’ does not.

BRING BACK J AND K

lose the stupid banner with my profile on it.  it takes up too much real-estate in my browser window (especially since I zoom in quite a bit) and it has no features that I need moment-to-moment.  or at all, for that matter  :(