Topic: Overview of recent username changes in Bitcointalk (Read 1905 times)

Have been a little busy over 3 days to check whats happening here in this topic, but I have been reading that, the primary intention of this topic has delved into something very different to privacy and risking of user accounts in the process. I would like to apologize if the topic has created harm to the privacy things of the above mentioned accounts but the intentions of starting this topic was never meant to mean that or to reveal their privacy centric changes.

I have not really encountered major changes like these in the past and all I have seen is a complete name change which was done years before. Other changes were done by the donators and mods but all were minor changes to those display names as far as I know. With theymos clearing up these and concerning the privacy of others, I had deleted the names mentioned in OP and hence locking the topic.

Hm. This is probably a good time to follow suit? @Heisenberg_Hunter?

Just an opinion, people with some sort of privacy issue with their current forum accounts and need to actually disappear, would request a complete deletion of entire history, and possibly just reserve the account name (by recreating it) and simply never log in after that.

If I would request a name change, (and I think I had the opportunity to do that for a few years, but never exercised the option) I'd want something even shorter. But that's just me.

I don’t doubt the information is already being misused.

The thing is that the people who are spying on forum members don’t reasonably own the data they are collecting. Ditto for those who are scraping posts and other information. So I don’t think it would be fair for these people to make the decision to disclose or not.

Most of the time when a third party adds some additional functionality to a social media platform, they connect via API and only request the specific information needed to display the additional information to their user. It is unusual for a third party to have their own database of information they display.

When someone posts on the forum, they are making the informed implicit decision to trust theymos with various information. With so many people spying on forum members and scraping various information from the forum, their information is being given to people they don’t necessarily trust and probably aren’t aware their information is being collected by these people. 

Let's have a thought experiment:we already have Bitcoin mixers. What if we would have a Bitcointalk Account Mixer?
For the sake or argument let's assume there are 8 people with more or less similar accounts (similar Rank, similar Trust, similar language). Those 8 account owners would all exchange their account in a big random shuffle, where none of them knows who gets which account. Their feedback can get a bold marker stating the date of the account shuffle, so it's obvious the older feedback belonged to a different person.
Of course, this isn't ideal: the post history for instance suddenly doesn't belong to the person anymore. But the most important argument against account sales won't be a problem: none of these people would have an increased reason to start scamming or spamming with the "new" account.

I doubt that the matter is so clear as some supposed enlightened philosopher king shedding light on this particular matter.

The change of user names matter cuts both ways in terms of transparency and in terms of attempts to balance interests of individuals and the community as a whole.

I personally don't get any kind of hard-on to give tools to folks who are abusive of these kinds of information systems, yet I stick by my earlier assertions regarding the possible necessity to start a new account as being a feasible and practical avenue...   

Sure, it is nice that theymos and/or other admins are NOT necessarily lightly allowing for the changes of usernames... and surely I hope that those admins are NOT getting duped also by allowing for some change(s) when it might not be justified.. but sure, those are administrative balancing considerations that are discretionary and not necessarily clear cut.. and not even needing to be public... and any member who errors on arguing this subject on the side of transparency and disallowance of such username changes would not necessarily be in the wrong... even if they also might not have enough information in any particular case to know what were the various factors considered for any particular case.

Mmmm crazy what a theymos post can bring to the place, suddenly people realise things

then again better late than never   

Thanks for doing the right thing.

I have removed the list I had posted earlier in the thread. I appreciate the privacy concerns and I apologize for underestimating them when I posted that.

---

Big words from someone who's stalking forum members on social media.

Let's face it Quicksy, your only concern is your account farm.

For merit sources there isn't anything more easy then ignore merit beggars and if some do, then they just get some negative trust as being merit beggars ....
So most people will not be merit begging cause they no nothing good will come from it.

I to had given up on this thread as it was just a disappointment to me, as the opinion and talking of some members was even a bigger disappointment ....

But i'm glad reading some of the last posts of this thread.

(Bottomline I do think theymos isn't keeping himself busy with changing peoples names or taking it very lightly when he does)

I was almost giving up on this thread. I have email notification on but I was thinking to disable it so that I do not need to receive the email notification of the same posts posted by users with argumens. Some are in favour of documenting the changes and some are against it. The conversation can keep going and the thread gets bumped and search engine keeps caching it.

Those users who changed their names for privacy reasons, are now not really feeling the same I guess. In this forum users are making thousands of topics a day, how many of them we all notice dispite all of them are public but if we pick one of these topics and highlight it in somewhere like it's done for usernames in this topic, then it's easily discoverable. This topic actually doing the job of destroying the intentions some of those users had as their reasons behind changing their names.

I am glad that theymos has spoken out. And since theymos involved in this conversation, I would like him to consider deleting the entire thread so that in futures any with bad deed at least do not find everything in one place (in this thread). There are differences in between looking all over the place to find something (which in some cases turns out impossible) and finding something in one place (documented) very easily.

Everyone has their own views of this proposal of deleting this enture thread, even people can say that deleting this topic will mean that theymos in implying his power of position to control the voice of the users but really shell we say thst? Privacy should be the first thing we should count here. And every users has this right to practice their privacy. if a forum inspired with bitcoin idiology can not ensure it then it's sad.

I am sure if it continues this way one day it would be out of theymos hand's to control the amount of misuse of this data, as it is already been violating the main reason behind the implementations of some systems like trust list for example, mostly it begin as being something very private for users to make there own judgement but making it public just induced more drama. Even merit sources which were to be hidden for not being bitched for merits are now easily accessible to anyone who wants to hunt some.

If the this type of excessive scraping would not be curbed or handled now, than it would already be too late.

This is precisely what happens when you allow users to what amounts to spy on forum members. There is a job posting on Facebook (working for the company) for someone whose job it is to detect and stop scraping. I have been told this person would be on a fairly large team/group of people who have similar responsibilities. Other social media platforms have similar roles and all have policies prohibiting scraping (often being defined as non-human, or inauthentic or similar).

There should be a balance between allowing everyone to do whatever they want and having minor regulations, while empathizing the need for regulations to be minimally burdensome/costly, while providing a real benefit to the community as a whole that it cannot otherwise realize.

Who knows how much additional data certain people has on forum users, probably a decent amount, and probably enough to make a lot of people uncomfortable if they knew exactly what was being collected on them by third parties, even if the information is “public”.  

Why are you guys posting the old names of people who clearly needed their names changed for privacy reasons? Obviously any data posted online is going to be quickly archived somewhere, but that doesn't mean that your highlighting/reposting of it has no effect. In some cases you may literally be putting lives in danger. If you were investigating a scam or something, that'd be different, but you seem to just be indiscriminately & recklessly dredging up data that would best be forgotten.


Privacy is the top reason for me agreeing to a name change. It's just not often done for well-known users, and I don't announce it.


When a name is changed for privacy reasons, I sometimes partially or completely fix that. I consider quotes of the form [quote author=... link=topic=... to be fixable; other quotes are not.


 - If it looks like there's much chance that a scam case will be opened against someone, then I won't change their name to begin with.
 - Flags/feedback most often don't exist for users whose names I change
 - The Trust system is intentionally not accessible to search engines.
 - Trust ratings don't usually mention a user's original name or other sensitive details.

^^
I feel this thread was made mainly because that most of the users are trustworthy and one whom I know is a bounty manager and hence, it is confusing when these users with new usernames contact anyone and say I was earlier that user and them conducting a research to know if they are telling the truth. I don't get the privacy thing as they can still be identified having only changed their display names. One user seemed to have changed their username to make it look better and professional not for privacy reasons while others no clue.

I guess OP's title should be changed to "display name" instead of "username" as usernames have not changed.

Seriously. Some of these name changers might have done some bad opsec in the past hence why they need to change their username, but why shine the spotlight on them? It completely defeats the purpose. While it's still going to be really possible to affiliate them to their old usernames through their past posts, still. Shining the spotlight on them just makes it a lot easier for doxxing.

As long as they didn't do anything wrong in the past, I don't have anything against their decisions. I mean, privacy is one of the things us bitcoiners are fighting for right? Then what the fuck is this? Bullshit is what this is.

I missed that thread but I was actually thinking about retiring usernames of those who changed for privacy reasons.

Other old usernames can't be use to register again and while others can be (case to case basis). It all just comes down to their reason why.

The other old usernames should be retired also. They shouldn't be used again.