Make Public Interesting and Ignored Tags

Question

I've found that the Data Explorer doesn't have access to Interesting and Ignored Tags. I found this feature request to add them to the Data Dump, but the reason given for not doing so is that they are not public information.

Since I can't think of any good reasons to keep these private,

lets publicize a user's Interesting and Ignored Tags.

EDIT: Well it doesn't look like this idea will get traction, but I hope people can see through the arguments against. Look at what's already public about an individual:

• Questions
• Answers

• votes

• Tags (w/counts)
• Badges
• comments
• edits made
• reputation in total and per post
• favorites
• associated accounts

A whole gamut that could be used to simulate the tags of interest to the user, it just takes more complicated coding. By not making Interesting Tags public, we just giving the illusion of privacy, kind of like TSA gives the illusion of security at airports. It's privacy by complexity.

Answer 1

Lets talk about something called an expectation of privacy for a moment.

If I have data on SO that is not visible to others, I have a very reasonable expectation that that data will not be made public in database dumps. I've already entered that information with an expectation of privacy. That's not something you can just 'reverse'.

If its not already public, there is very little chance of it being included in a database dump. My questions and answers are CC-BY-SA, as the text is useful and I love to see it copied.

My interesting and ignored tags just feed companies that serve advertisements and figured out how the e-mail hash works .. and a few naturally curious people. The only people I want using that data are SO employees. I trust them, hence I provide information regarding the things that I like.

When it comes to DB dumps, what you see on the site is what you get. If that changed, I'd seriously consider not using the site anymore, so would a lot of people, hence its not very likely to happen.

Edit

As Kop suggests, I'd have no problem with aggregate stats. Just not on a user by user basis. I'm not disputing the usefulness of your proposal, it would be really cool to more accurately check what languages are rising in popularity with each dump. I'd just hate to see the dumps 'abused', beyond the current problem of people not following the license.

Answer 2

Aside from Tim's excellent post on the expectation of privacy, there are a host of other reasons.

This that are fundamentally public are information is anything which you are giving to the site. This is the information in your profile, and any of your posts/comments/answers.

Things which are fundamentally private are information relating to preferences, or how you use the site. That is, it is really no one else' business which questions I choose to view. It is not their business whether I get notifications or not. It is not their business how often I visit the site. And lastly, it is not their business which tags I choose to mark as "interesting".

The internet is currently all aflutter with privacy kerfuffles. Gmail's taking a huge hit for what they are doing with individual user search data (Oh, it's also private what my "search terms" are on SO), Facebook is taking huge flak for what they do with individual user data. It has become very clear that people want to be able to "publicize" information rather than be forced to "depublicize" it.

Which leads to the conclusion of this, which is: Why do you want it public? All the possible reasons fall into two categories. You want to know it or you want to act on it.

1. Satisfy your curiosity This is a terrible reason to make anything public, because many (if not most) people have curiosity about things that they have no business knowing. Satisfying curiosity is simply not a valid reason for making anything public.

2. Change your behaviour This would or could have a terrible outcome. I've mentioned it before (especially relating to these issues) StackOverflow is about asking questions. The last thing we want is people to "game" the system. This includes things like "Explain the fraud-detection algorithm", "How can I tell who's online", and your request "Which tags are most likely to be ignored/interested". The reason this is terrible? It would be a very STRONG incentive for people to start mis-tagging their posts because they know that more people are interested in [SharePoint] than [CommunityServer]. So you tag it falsly, and thereby generate more interest. The other half of this is people purposefully leaving off relevant tags because they are on many people's "ignore" list. For instance, there may be many people ignoring [r-language], but that doesn't mean that people shouldn't be tagging their questions with it.

Now, if you're saying, "Obviously, people wouldn't do that, it would be bad if they changed their tagging practices just because of this information" then you fall back to reason (1): That you only want to know because you're curious. Which, as I mentioned, is invalid.

EDIT: I also elaborated here.

Answer 3

As Tim Post pointed out there is a serious privacy concern, but I think there is no harm in releasing aggregate stats on the interesting/ignored tags :O

Answer 4

It's not privacy by complexity. All you can do with the public data is guess what someone's interesting and ignored tags are. Because these preferences are entire independent of the person's voting/tagging/posting content. Yes, the majority of users tend to have interesting tags for the places they participate in the most, and ignored tags for parts where they might avoid... but they aren't tied together. The illusion here isn't of privacy - the illusion is that you will derive someone's preferences because of their activity. The reality is that our private settings are in fact private, and you can only surmise what we have with the current public data.

For example, I once set my interesting tags on Meta to be [status*] so that those qustions are highlighted for me. You cannot derive that from the data dump. Nor is there any reason for that to be public knowledge without my consent (see Tim's post about expectation of privacy). My preferences on the other sites are my own business.

Answer 5

Perhaps instead, would it be possible to access or import one's own interesting/ignored tags from associated accounts?