[ckan-dev] Privacy of user activity in CKAN 2.0

Thu May 30 14:30:04 UTC 2013

> I don't see why CKAN needs to even have a concept of whether an
> activity is/was private, separate from whether the dataset is
> currently private.
> 
> Activities hidden along with everything else when a dataset is made
> private. After all, what's the point of seeing activities to a dataset
> that you can't see? It is liable to cause confusion ('but this dataset
> doesn't exist') and most unlikely to be useful.
> 
> Conversely, if a dataset is made public, everything else about the
> dataset is visible so why not the activities? For one thing, this
> could again lead to confusion when different users, looking at the
> same public dataset, could see different histories.
> 
> An important thing in general is that the behaviour should be simple
> enough that users should be able to form a clear model of what's going
> on. For my tuppence, having activities with their own concept of
> public-ness, separate from the dataset's, is complex and subtle enough
> to break this.

Fair enough, this is probably the simplest solution to implement as
well. Maybe we should make a github issue for this? Change the current
behaviour (no activities created while a dataset is private) to all a
private dataset's activities are private and all a public dataset's
activities are public (activities don't have their own private/public
flag, they just follow their dataset's current value).