A plan for the kernel Bugzilla

Posted Oct 11, 2022 23:49 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
Parent article: A plan for the kernel Bugzilla

Wouldn't adding maintainers wholesale to bugzilla be a pretty serious GDPR violation? Dunno quite what could be done about it, but if bugzilla is owned by the LF, it's quite likely they could be forced to take the whole lot down.

Certainly it's a pretty blatant case of spamming. Even as a volunteer (nothing to do with Linux), we very recently went through our mailing list (e- and snail-) cleaning it up and making sure we only had people on it who wanted it to be. This was precisely to avoid any GDPR problems.

Cheers,
Wol

A plan for the kernel Bugzilla

Posted Oct 12, 2022 10:18 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (3 responses)

The GDPR is like a large shiny hammer. Please don't use it on screws whose threads need fixing.

A plan for the kernel Bugzilla

Posted Oct 12, 2022 10:31 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes. But scraping email addresses and adding them to some sort of mailing list is a large rusty nail that needs dealing with. A large shiny hammer is an extremely useful tool for that!

(Don't get me wrong, if people WANT to be on the list, great. Just don't add them without getting permission because you think they should be getting all this junk mail ...)

Cheers,
Wol

A plan for the kernel Bugzilla

Posted Oct 19, 2022 15:59 UTC (Wed) by harisphnx (subscriber, #139363) [Link] (1 responses)

I am guessing having your name in the maintainers list grants some permission to. random individuals and the Linux kernel community to spam you with issues. Whether this would also apply to this mass addition, I am unsure.

A plan for the kernel Bugzilla

Posted Oct 19, 2022 17:50 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I think it very clearly doesn't.

Even scraping the addresses and sending a "subscribe" request which the maintainer needs to acknowledge is extremely dodgy.

As a "business" entity, bugzilla needs MY permission if they want to send me emails. And it's opt IN, not opt out.

If you give them permission, on my behalf, without my knowledge, you are dropping them in it; and if they find out you did it, they will have every reason to sue you to oblivion to pay for the mess.

And stuff the legalities, it is just plain unsociable to make work FOR OTHER PEOPLE without paying any consideration to whether they are even capable of undertaking that work! The only reason spam isn't a bigger problem than it is is that most of it is deleted on sight by ISPs - do you really want bugzilla to be classified as a spammer and denied even to the people who want it?

Cheers,
Wol