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A comment on I was part of a human subject research study without my consent. Parent comment

Re:I was part of a human subject research study without my c... by smsm42 on Monday December 20, 2021 @12:39PM (#29627465)
Why it is hard? The servers need to know the IP address, for sure, but they do not need to permanently record it. In fact, un-aggregated IP is probably not that useful for statistics either, I can be aggregated e.g. daily and then discarded.

You seem to be confusing temporarily holding information in the database (no matter whether in-memory or on persistent media) for operational purposes (be it networking or threat detection) and permanent storage of the same information way beyond the time it ceased to be useful for the purposes above.

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Re:I was part of a human subject research study without my c... by dawnbreez on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @10:26PM (#29645281)
As I understand it, from a legal standpoint, storing it for operational purposes is equivalent to storing it for any other purpose.

Also, even if you only store the information for 24 hours--how many users are on Hackernews in a given hour? How many of them click through the top links? Certainly enough that some sites have crashed under the load, which makes me think that the number is higher than 50K. Congrats, you're now storing 50K IPs, despite having an automated system to delete them in a day.

(I don't even wanna think about the headache it'd cause if you got dragged to court over this. I don't know how many judges will understand that you delete the list every 24 hours to avoid being liable for storing it, not to get rid of evidence.)

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