Hello FLAGRANT violation of my privacy. You morons.

[bladespark]

When you comment in a community* the community moderators and the owner of the post you commented on can now see your location. Country, state, and city. Which means that people living in small towns who do things like... oh... call out a scammer on their scammy posts, for one example I've seen happen a lot, can now be found. Physically. Where you live. By people who might have a reason to go and hurt them.

You can't turn it off. You can't opt out. It doesn't draw from the fields you voluntarily fill in either, far as I can tell it's pulling the info from your IP address. And it's retroactive so every comment you've ever made in any community EVER now has your real location attached to it.

Bra. Fricking. Vo. Livejournal. Bravo. If anybody gets hurt because of this I hope you get sued into oblivion. This is almost enough to make me leave lj, permanently and for real this time, even though this is my primary internet "home" and social hub.

Morons. What the HELL were they thinking of when they did this? WHAT THE EVERLIVING HELL.

(And yes, I know that by posting people's IP addresses they've effectively been doing the same thing all along. But there is a big difference between "If somebody knows how and wants to go through the effort they can see where you live" and "HERE'S WHERE YOU LIVE FOR ANY IDIOT TO SEE RIGHT NOW, NO EFFORT REQUIRED." That kind of thing puts ideas into people's heads. It begs for abuse. It's just pleading for somebody to do something stupid.)

*Update: Apparently it's not all communities. Since I don't own any communities to test with I'm not sure what settings are required, I'm hearing conflicting answers from different people. There's some protesting going on in the latest lj news post, but it looks like most people haven't noticed the change yet. LJ itself has said nothing at all about this, neither notification it was starting nor defense of it continuing.

Update again: They've removed the feature. And there is a poll (and good comments discussion) about the IP logging here: http://lj-feedback.livejournal.com/16181.html

Update some more: Oh GODS I'm glad they removed this. It told people specifically when you move/go on vacation. Ie. if you post from a new spot it displayed (New location(Formerly Old Location)) That is such a bad idea that I can't even come up with words for how much of a bad idea it is! And it means that you can't retroactively proxy it to fix the problem, as it will then say (proxy location(formerly real location)) WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?

Yay, one more update: "Generally, when you run an IP addresses (past and present) through a search engine, it defaults to the largest town within a certain radius, thus preserving some sense of anonymity. What is being broadcasted on lj, however, is much more specific.

In one instance I entered an IP address from location x into a search engine and it showed my location to be ~20miles from x. LJ reported my location to be ~5miles from location x. (And, incidentally, the town lj announces is not even shown on some road maps.)"

From a user's complaint on the well-hidden post from livejournal that mentioned this "feature" in passing. (Which I finally dug out.)

Now will people please stop treating me like I'm some kind of idiot and admit that I had reason to be concerned? Thanks so much.

Comments

[draggo.livejournal.com]

It's called DHCP. It also depends on how the DHCP server is setup and how long the lease is set for each IP address which can vary a lot.

[jordanis.livejournal.com]

I am quite aware of what DHCP is. Like everyone with more than one computer, I have my own adorable little DHCP server on my desk.

The problem is that you've gone and started exaggerating to make your point. You know and I know that running a DHCP server with that short a lease turnover is a ridiculous way to run a railroad. Unfortunately, you've fallen in love with showing your technical superiority to the knowlessmen by telling them how groundless and silly their worries are. If I had to hazard, I would guess that this is a habit so long-running as to be nearly reflex after a career of dealing with flighty managers and panicky secretaries.

Alas, this is exactly the sort of condescension that invariably drives casual users screaming from the FOSS community: you are calling people stupid for feeling that an issue is, in fact, an issue. In your haste, you are missing the key point: LJ is divulging information about a user that was not previously available without that user's consent. Yes, it's nothing that you couldn't look up before, but LJ users aren't IT professionals. Most of them did not previously know how to do anything with IPs except match them to find sockpuppets, if even that.

Further, you're ignoring the lazy-ass programming that went into this. The information is available to community mods and /the poster/ of the post in question to a community. You know, the poster that someone is calling out as a scammer, con, or liar? It's lazy inheritance of permissions from the parent object without the least bit of thought.

Finally, you're ignoring how normal people think! An IP address attached to a comment is glossed over. An IP address instinctively means something to very, very few people. When a username is attached to 'Bedford, TX', though, the information is automatically and instinctively relevant to anyone reading it. It feels and reads completely different to normal people, and it should come as no surprise to the LJ team that people react differently to it. They are professional developers of a social networking service, and thinking this would fly with normal users (particularly since the users left on LJ are the ones who rejected Facebook's anti-privacy crap) is remarkably nerd-tunnel-vision of them.

[ekmahal.livejournal.com]

This!

(I'd replied to Captain Knowitall above before reading your reply, Jordanis.)