[diversity] Proposal for anonymous gender metric question now on RIPE Labs

Denis and all,

At 2017-06-15 11:26:15 +0000
denis walker <ripedenis at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Thanks for the update but it is still not acceptable. Surveymonkey is
> for cheap, diy surveys. The RIPE NCC sets up and operates the survey.
> That is simply NOT acceptable with such sensitive personal data.

I think it's fine.

> First of all you have the possibility of user error in configuration
> and NOT turn off IP address collection. I won't accept the argument
> that "this won't happen" or "we will be very careful". I have been in
> this industry for a long time. Even the most obvious and simple
> configurations are set wrongly at times.

This is not set by each user, but by the survey creator. I think it's a
good idea to require double-checking this is done correctly before
opening registration. (Honestly I find it weird that it's not the
default, but I guess people love data...)

> Secondly you have the option to look at individual results from
> survey users. These include a very precise timestamp. That can be
> correlated with the registration data and you can identify
> individuals.

This is a good point. Maybe we can look to see if there is a way to
disable this level of tracking? Alternately indeed some other survey
company can be used.

> Stop trying to do this on the cheap. If you want to collect such
> highly sensitive personal data, contract a third party company to
> operate a survey for you and send a report back to the RIPE NCC of
> the anonymous data collected. Something like you do for a member or
> staff survey. Yes it costs money to do that, but it is the only
> acceptable way forward.

I disagree. I think this is a reasonable approach.

> You are asking a group of mostly technical people to provide this
> sensitive personal data. They know how software works and how data is
> stored and handled. I doubt anyone from Russia and it's neighbours,
> the middle east and parts of Africa will do anything other than
> respond with their biological gender. It is too risky to do anything
> else, so some will lie. Your results will be meaningless.

Any self-reported data has limitations. We know going in that this
isn't going to be something we can compare with previous or past data
sets, but as I said when I supported this general approach, I think
that some data is better than no data.

Cheers,

--
Shane
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