On Mar 5, 2018, at 10:44 AM, Toerless Eckert <tte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is no such conflict. The IETF does not use individual or small group photos to establish the identities of IETF participants. If it did, I could google, e.g., "David Black IETF" and see a picture of David, whose face I can picture in my mind, and happen to know is associated with that name. But I don't get a picture of him. David is a pretty important IETF participant (in my mind at least). I don't know that he has a particular allergy to having his photo taken. If the IETF were actually using peoples' pictures in the way that you are claiming here, I would have found his photo with a Google search. So if you have some reason for opposing this policy, whatever that reason may be, this is not that reason. If it were, you would have been demanding David's picture years ago. (BTW, I mention David because his picture doesn't show up in a Google search—plenty of IETF participants' pictures do show up. I get plenty of hits for "David Black IETF" and they are referring to the right David Black—I just don't get a picture.) Also, as a former IESG member, I can remember us specifically discussing the question of how we know for sure who actually participated on a document. The answer is that in theory this is an unsolved problem. In practice, it hasn't been an issue—when we've needed to know whether a particular person participated, it's been possible to do so. But we have IETF participants who really don't identify themselves with a legal name. If we needed to establish their identity, we'd have to rely on courts to help us do so, and we might fail. This is just how things are. When we had this discussion, one of the questions that came up was "should we do something to make this more reliable?" There was no appetite for it. |
