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Maniphest T10063

E-mail addresses are publicly exposed
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Description

E-mail addresses are currently being publicly exposed via Diffusion. For example:

https://secure.phabricator.com/rXPRFbaf2db18470f086bdb0635f99bce3f289c32dad7

I'm aware that the e-mail address is in the commit history anyway, but this is now publicly exposing it via the web. It even shows up in a Google search. The worst implication of this is that spam bots can easily harvest this.

I consider this a bug as there doesn't seem to be any option to hide or mask e-mail addresses. E-mail addresses should be hidden by default in my opinion. I doubt there would be many people who'd like their personal e-mail address publicly visible on the web without it at least being masked or protected by a captcha.

I hope that I've reported this correctly (apologies if I haven't). I'm not actually a Phabricator user. I'm just an open-source contributor who's discovered his e-mail address being publicly exposed via someone else's Phabricator site.

Event Timeline

MichaelDePiazzi created this task.Dec 29 2015, 2:47 AM
epriestley closed this task as Wontfix.Dec 29 2015, 3:40 AM
epriestley claimed this task.
epriestley added a subscriber: epriestley.

I don't think this represents a real problem. This information is inherently public: pushing commits to a public repository makes this information public and easily retrievable by automated means.

Our behavior is not particularly unusual, either. Although GitHub masks addresses from user-facing web UI, you can trivially retrieve them without cloning:

https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/commit/1443e4b13dd42bed22dc4480e071d37cd53dee55.patch

Other software like Gerrit does not mask addresses at all. And, ultimately, an attacker can just clone repositories.

Being indexed by Google does not, in and of itself, make addresses easier to collect indiscriminately, and it is trivial to collect addresses if you are targeting repositories.

(Purely personally, I've committed using a VCS-specific git@epriestley.com address for many years, since I can't imagine a situation where I'd want a human to look up my personal address from commit history and send me an email, although this practice does not seem to be widespread.)

epriestley added a comment.Dec 29 2015, 3:59 AM

Actually, even GitHub exposes unrecognized email addresses directly in the page source, which is the same behavior we have:

Screen Shot 2015-12-28 at 7.55.52 PM.png (1×2 px, 458 KB)

(Of course, it is less likely that an address will be unrecognized on GitHub than it is that it will be unrecognized on any given Phabricator install, given GitHub's scale and centralization.)

MichaelDePiazzi added a comment.Dec 29 2015, 3:59 AM

Fair enough I guess, and you are right. It's just a reality check when you see your personal e-mail address pop up in a Google search... :/

I just wish I had the foresight to also use a dummy e-mail address instead of going with the GitHub recommendation of using your real e-mail address. Although, they've since added an option to make your e-mail address private (https://github.com/blog/1580-keep-your-email-private). This obviously doesn't help with commits I've already made though... :/

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