denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
Denise ([staff profile] denise) wrote in [site community profile] dw_news 2024-09-18 08:14 am (UTC)

Yes, that too! Obviously we work really hard to keep the site secure, but "what kind of stuff could get exposed if God forbid we ever did have a security incident" has always been in the backs of our minds. I do not want to have to secure that data! There's a reason we have never, ever, ever had any user credit card data actually touch our servers in any way, shape, or form! I have even deliberately threat-modeled "okay, what if a hostile government sent a subpoena to our payment processor instead of to us because they have a DW username and can see that it's a paid account", because we have a lot more legal leeway to refuse non-US subpoenas because we only operate in the US, while all the major payment processors these days have a domestic legal presence in a lot of different countries. It is (very, very deliberately) not possible for any government that could legally force information out of our payment processor to connect someone's payment details to their DW username (or vice versa) just with information from our payment processor: you would need to correlate it with information from us, and we ain't ever giving that up without a hell of a fight. (Mind you, there are still some circumstances where we'd lose that fight, but fewer than with other platforms that are more multinational. And, I should disclaim lest anyone worry that this has ever happened, this is all hypothetical anyway. But it's something we are always very careful to think through!)

Other people in the industry are regularly shocked by how little information we collect about our users when I tell them. Like, a few of these "think of the children" bills have been including things like "you have to be able to tell the (alleged) parent of one of your under-18 users how much time the user spends on your site on average each day". We don't know! We have no freaking idea! We can't have any idea unless we implement all kinds of super invasive tracking systems that would still be incredibly inaccurate, because nothing can distinguish "opened a tab with an entry that's novel-length, has been reading it for the last six hours" from "opened a tab with an entry, wandered away from the site" without massively, massively invasive measures that we will fight to the death to avoid having to ever implement! But the idea that we don't measure session length just baffles a lot of people.

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