Hello relay and/or bridge operators,
you might already know this: we're publishing sanitized versions of bridge descriptors on Tor Metrics.
https://metrics.torproject.org/collector.html#bridge-descriptors
We're using these sanitized descriptors to visualize interesting facts about Tor bridges, among other things:
https://metrics.torproject.org/bridges-ipv6.html
We're now considering to drop one step in the sanitizing step, which is to remove contact information. The result would be that we'd keep contact information in sanitized descriptors in the exact same way as the bridge operator put it into their torrc file.
https://metrics.torproject.org/bridge-descriptors.html#contact
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20983
Possible advantages are: - Relay Search would support searching for bridges by contact information. - People who keep a watching eye on the Tor network could reach out to bridge operators to inform them that they're running an outdated tor/PT version, or that running bridges and exits together is not cool. - If somebody ever revives OnionTip/TorTip, bridges could participate and receive donations for running a bridge. Or t-shirts, who knows. Note that I'm not promising either here, but without contact information, neither would even be possible.
Possible disadvantages are: - If somebody runs a relay and a bridge, both with the same contact information, a censoring adversary might guess that the bridge might run on a nearby IP address as the relay. However, they could as well assume that for all relays and block or scan the IP space around all known relays. - Bridge operators might be surprised to see their contact information in a public archive. We do have a warning in the tor manual https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en#ContactInfo, but maybe nobody reads the fine manual.
Your opinion counts. Is this a good or a bad idea, and why?
I'll keep this discussion open for a week and not start changing anything during that time. If you want to state your opinion, please do it on this list by Wednesday, February 14.
Thanks!
All the best, Karsten