>> Some people have argued that it should be possible to participate >>in some or all IETF processes while remaining partly or completely >>anonymous. Is this a reasonable expectation? >No. Anonymous or pseudonymous contributions would allow a scumbag >patent troll to inject ideas into a standard for which s/he held >an undisclosed patent. I don't see how we can draw a line between >that and other types of contribution. To tease this out a little more, the IETF makes no effort to verify the identities of people who join or send mail to mailing lists, while we expect that people who physically attend IETF meetings register under their real names and sign the attendance sheets in sessions. As far as I know, no RFC (other than perhaps April 1) has an author using a pseudonym, but is that policy, or just the way it happens to have worked? There is certainly some difference here, since the mailing lists and RFCs are immediately available to the world, while the attendance info is not, but we seem to have different policies in practice. I am NOT suggesting that a privacy policy should go into this level of detail, but it needs to deal with the reality that in some contexts we require people to provide PII, while in others it is conventional but not required. R's, John _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf