RE: Git Privacy

From: Jason Pyeron <jpyeron@pdinc.us>
Date: Jul 16, 2023, 23:27 UTC
Message-ID: <00b901d9b83d$249a2d20$6dce8760$@pdinc.us>
In-Reply-To: <CU3Z2NYP6BGG.1PQ6S5AF60XX6@anonymous>

Show 13 quoted lines

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nick 
> Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2023 7:07 PM
> Subject: Re: Git Privacy
> 
> nick wrote:
> > The time zones reveal private information about developers and they
> > don't even serve a use case, as far as I'm aware. A backwards-compatible
> > way to solve this leak would be to convert timestamps to UTC by default
> > and have a Git config option to revert back to the current behavior.
> 
> Come to think of it, even if timezones were converted to UTC by default,
> time of day would still leak information about a user's likely timezone.

Discussed this with our policy wonks...

Short answer - no. There is no legal assumption that can be made - your work hours cannot be assumed to be 9-5. They also said that time zone is "too broad at 1/24th of the world", but understood the concern.

That being said the recommendation is to add --privacy

Where it assumes some defaults and those defaults can be controlled in your config or via --privacy=option1,option2

And then some of the options can be:

date-timezone=UTC

date-precision=8hour

etc...

v/r,

Jason Pyeron

.mil: jason.j.pyeron.ctr@mail.mil .com: jpyeron@pdinc.us tel : 202-741-9397