[tor-talk] What do bridge operators expect when providing a ContactInfo line?

[Karsten Loesing <karsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi bridge operators,

Nick rightly suggests moving this discussion from Trac here: What do
bridge operators expect when providing a ContactInfo line?

Details are on Trac, pasting below:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9854


There's an interesting question in the Tor StackExchange beta:

"""
I'm guessing that a bridge uploads its ContactInfo to the bridge
authority, so there's a point of contact for the Tor project.

Is this information available to any other parties, i.e. users
requesting bridges, or people randomly connecting to IP addresses
looking for Tor installations?
"""

In practice, users of a bridge will be able to learn the bridge's
ContactInfo line, because they download the bridge's descriptor.

But Tor people will have a hard time to do that, because this line is
removed from bridge descriptors in the sanitizing process. One needs
access to the non-sanitized descriptors, which limits the set of people
to maybe five. I don't remember a single time in the past couple of
years when we tried to contact bridge operators using provided contact
information.

This is rather unexpected for bridge operators, I'd think. I guess most
bridge operators would expect their contact information to be known to
Tor project people and used for debugging only.

Three options:

1.    We conclude we don't need the contact line for bridges, because we
wouldn't contact the bridge operator anyway. Bridges should remove that
line from their descriptor before uploading.
2.    We decide this information is important and that we should have it
available more easily. We don't remove the ContactInfo line when we
sanitize bridge descriptors.
3.    We don't change anything, because everything's fine as it is. At
least now we know this information is theoretically available to a few
Tor people and definitely available to bridge users.


Feel free to reply on the ticket.  If you reply here (tor-relays@) and
*don't* want me to paste your reply on the ticket, please mention that
in your reply.

Thanks!
Karsten
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