Letters to the Editor: Doxing the KKK, Websites Leaking Your Data, and Comments

*clinks glass*

Readers of Motherboard! Features editor Brian Anderson here. Hope everyone is doing well.

It's been nearly a month since Motherboard decided to replace comments with something better: letters to the editor. It's been nice hearing from so many of you. This is exactly why we killed comments. I'm not saying anything new here, but your feedback, and the dialogue it sparks, makes us better. Something on your mind about a story we published? Drop us a line: letters@motherboard.tv.

Anyway, I plumbed through this week's submissions and am quarterbacking to specific editors and writers. Right to it, then.

Anonymous had nothing to do with doxing KKK members

I don't know if your [sic] aware but the information that was let out was fake and anon had nothing to do with it so I was just relaying the information I received. Thanks have a great week.

-Scotty Gardner

From Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Motherboard staff writer:

Thanks for reaching out!

I believe you are correct. As we point out in our story on Thursday, some Anonymous groups distanced themselves from the first data dump of alleged KKK members, which happened last weekend. It's unclear who was responsible for it, but it appears it wasn't a group "officially" affiliated with Anonymous. Obviously, no one is "officially" affiliated with Anonymous, in a way, but the Thursday leak seems to have been sanctioned by some more established Anonymous Twitter accounts, which is as "official" as it gets with Anonymous.

In our story Monday we were careful to say Anonymous in the headline, because it was unclear who the group was. On Thursday, however, we felt more confident to say that.

We also updated Monday's article to clarify that the hackers declined to specify where they obtained information regarding the alleged KKK members.

Nine out of 10 of the internet's top websites are leaking your data

Your article about sites leaking data about me was interesting, but not terribly dissimilar to others that I've read. What's missing? Clear evidence of harm. I read that Google and others don't pass personally identifiable information, but then I'm not always convinced, or convinced that it's a sufficient promise of my protection.

Then…I think, I've been on the Internet for 20+ years and I struggle at seeing how *I*, or anyone else, has been harmed. Sure, peoples credit card info, or SS#'s are stolen, but that's separate from the topic of this article.

I'd love to see some good investigation into the real harm that's being done, or not being done.

-Alan White

***

Hello Brian - nice article on tracking. I hope you find amusing irony in the list of tracking sights that watched me read your article. They include google (of course) imrworldwide.com, pintrest.com, ggbht.com, quantserve.com, scorecardresearch.com, doubleclick.net, krxd.net, facebook, twitter, and chartbeat.com.

-John Helm

Over to Brian Merchant, senior editor. Alan's first:

That's the big question here. Since Google is so reluctant to go on record about its internal practices, it's hard to find hard evidence of harm. Their stated policy may be to not pass on user data, but if forced to do so by, say, the NSA, they may legally have no choice—and their data collection policies may mean that there's a server full of your user data on hand in the event that the NSA might want it, for whatever reason. Secondly, you may trust Google now, but technically, they could store your user data for as long as they'd like, and their policies may continue to drift from their erstwhile Do-No-Eviling.

There are definitely some instances when data collection can have distinctly adverse and privacy-violating effects—less scrupulous data brokers have been fined for selling consumer data to identity thieves, for instance. I think a broad investigation into the harm of data leaking thus is a great idea, too, and there are many reporters, like our own Lorenzo Franceschi-Biccherai, examining such topics—maybe we'll take it on next.

Now for you, John:

Thanks for writing, data vizzing, and for pointing this out—it's why I mentioned our own website by name in the piece, in fact! The truth is that a lot of commercial, for-profit websites use a load of these tools, for their convenience and utility. That includes us—we run Chartbeat and Google Analytics for traffic analysis, we serve ads, and we have a host of social media buttons to encourage reader engagement (Facebook, Twitter, etc), all of which receive user data—and most of which are very useful, and help keep us afloat. It's worth having the conversation about how much of this data gets collected, to consider what best practices for such collection going forward might be—for us, too!

Motherboard should have a comment section

Please add comments on motherboard so I can tell Carles to never, ever stop doing what he's doing.

-Chris Kilbourn

Hey, Chris. We shut down comments as way to breathe new life in discussions between our readers and ourselves, instead of keeping those discussions buried in comment threads. We've enjoyed Carles' work since the Hipster Runoff days, and it's a treat to have him weighing in on life on the content farm. His thoughts this week on the shuttering of Grantland and fear of a world without meaningful content are essential. We've forwarded your note to the man himself. Thanks for reading!