[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.

[cr3ative]

You’re being a little evasive about the context of the information posted. If I joined your TF2 server and a bot automatically posted my ASN somewhere, I’d be reasonably uncomfortable with that.

You seem to have made your mind up that your situation isn’t a problem, but haven’t given us enough context to evaluate that ourselves.

[slowdog]

I think most folks would disagree that the other commenter is on the "extreme" end of the privacy spectrum. It's very context specific. Some ISPs are state specific or even town specific.

I agree with my sibling comments, your evasiveness isn't helping us make up our own opinions on this matter.

[maxbond]

I think most people would agree that an ISP is PII, and that whether it's okay to share is dependent on the context.

Could you tell us a bit more about that context? What "players" were these ASNs in reference to? Why did people in your server seem taken aback when you posted them? What was the discussion about when you made this comment? Why post ASNs at all? You said it was to prove people in Asia weren't using your Asian servers, what does that mean exactly?

To be clear, I've heard of lots of bad moderation calls from Discord, and I'd be nervous about building on them too. My mind remains open. But I agree with the sibling comment's characterization that you seem evasive - and that raise a red flag for me.