[bottiger1]

Yes it is very possible. I have also posted asns in private channels before and nothing ever happened. It was only after I posted it in a public channel that I got banned.

There are a few competitors that are really jealous of our success.

[Earwig]

From googling your username, it sounds like you are connected to Skial, the TF2 server?

So I'm guessing you posted ASNs of (in your words, basically ISPs) of some players on your server, indicating generally where they live. Was it connected to specific people? I can see why Discord would consider that private info.

[bottiger1]

It was just a list of ASNs. There was no other information that would allow you to connect them to a user.

And it was also not "malicious" as described by their email to me.

[nneonneo]

There are nearly 100,000 ASNs. Some are very small. An ASN is enough to identify a user's ISP - enough for someone significantly more malicious than you to, say, social engineer an ISP, report players to their ISP for "hacking" a site, or start correlating with their visitors.

What we're also missing is the context. Did you share the ASNs for the purposes of, say, debugging a network connection? For statistical purposes? Or was the message more "look at the people connecting to my server, j/k these are just ASNs"? The tone you use matters too: by sharing ASNs, you could easily be hinting that you have people's real IPs, and that could be taken the wrong way.

I don't doubt that Discord overreacted here, but I certainly think there's a high chance that your message could have been misinterpreted as a threat to privacy.

[bottiger1]

Showing an ISP is NOT personal information, full stop.

If I say *Comcast* are you going to be able to track me down? No. There are millions of Comcast subscribers. Even if it was an ISP of 1 customer, that still isn't personal information. If the ISP happens to leak the customer information from social engineering, that's on the ISP, not me.

All ASNs are considered to be public information. You are required by internet registry rules to be listed in a public database for everyone to see. As far as I can tell, most people would agree that listing stats like this is not considered personal information.

I did not joke about it in any way. I showed people a list to demonstrate that we had a lot of users from Asia yet they did not use our servers in Asia. Even if I did joke about it, it still doesn't make this personal information.

[philipwhiuk]

The list of ASNs is public info. The ASN currently used by a group of people is not. It's location info for those people.

> You are required by internet registry rules to be listed in a public database for everyone to see.

No. The list of all ASNs are.

I think you need to take "information connected to people" more seriously and if this is the way it has to happen, that's not the worst outcome for you.

[bottiger1]

I'm sorry but you seem to be on the extreme end of the privacy spectrum that few people agree with.

If everyone agreed with you, this post would have been deleted off hacker news as well.

If you follow the logic of "information connected to people" however indirect, nobody would be allowed to post any visitor statistics and that is clearly absurd.