WordPress sends me TMI about my commenters
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I posted this on my blogs (I have two) and I’d like to post it here as well. I’m not sure how to contact WordPress about this.
I don’t get comments on my blog often, but when I do, I’m sent email notifications asking me to approve them. And I now realise that there’s way too much personal information attached to these notifications. Under a section headed ‘More about [commenter]‘ there is a list of information about the commentor which I feel that I shouldn’t really need to know.
This information consists of the commenter’s IP address, email address, profile URL (if commenting from an account), and a link labelled ‘Whois’. I’m not sure exactly what this last one would tell you. I’ve never clicked on it.
I’m concerned about the invasion of privacy involved with showing a blogger such information about their commenters who I’m sure are unaware that this is happening. I just thought people should know, and wonder if any other blogger has noticed this as well.
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That information is required by the software so it can identify legitimate commenters and differentiate them from spammers.
Also know that IP addresses have not been unique for over a decade and only about 30% actually trace back to any individual computer.
In addition many of us use a throwaway email address exclusively for our blogs and keep our personal email address only for friend and family use.
Whois information is public information.
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Thanks for the reply, but I hope you can understand why I’m still concerned.
The software may require personal information, but do other bloggers need it as well? Surely there should be a way to keep that information private, so other users can’t see it.
So what about the 30% of IP addresses that do trace back? This doesn’t seem to me like an ‘only’ statistic.
I still think a lot of us may use personal email addresses. One of my commenters recently doesn’t have a blog here and was actually using Google+ to comment. That’s one of my concerns is the issue about people visiting who aren’t familiar with the privacy policy etc.
Whois may be public information, but I didn’t know about it before now, and don’t know how to use the website.
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I understand what you posted. There is no way to remove that information from comments and expecting that it will be removed is not realistic.
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Clearly you have never gotten death threats via comments. Once you do you will change your mind.
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@raincoaster
I wondered if I should say that but decided I was too tired to get into the back and forth yammer. Thanks for posting. -
Hi there,
Thank you for your input on this matter. As you have already seen, the subject of privacy versus knowledge is a controversial one; not just on our Forums but within our own company as well. We are sensitive to some of our users’ desires for privacy but we must also be cognizant of the desire for additional information from others.
I am afraid that at this time I don’t have an answer for you. We feel the email which is sent out provides the right amount of information. It’s worth noting that a visitor’s IP address is used to track hits on any particular site already, and while we do not expose that data in our stats, many other sites do.
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Also, you can get that visitor IP information here at WP.com by installing the right kind of stat counter from a third party.
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Thank you, everyone, for the comments. This is pretty much what I expected. I am aware that this is a controversial issue with no easy answer. However, I feel that I have learned something from this discussion anyway.
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