To everyone on my flist:
if you leave a comment in a community or a journal that logs IP addresses, your country/city will now be displayed alongside the IP address.This fuckery is from
lj_releases, which just casually mentioned it at the end of their most recent post:
Users who have enabled Comment IP logging will now also see the Country and City information of the commenter. This information is only visible to the journal owner, community owner/maintainers, or author of the entry if it is posted to a community with this feature enabled (only those who can currently see IP information). This feature is providing the publicly available geo-location associated with the IP address in the same way the "location" feature on our Update page currently functions.
Now, granted, anyone can take your IP address and use any one of the various programs out there to find your country/city, but this is basically handing that information to them on a silver platter. It's really fucking creepy.
Based on some of the comments over at the post, it sounds like the country/city information is applied
retroactively to all comments - and, moreover, when community owners opt-out of the IP logging, the changes only apply to new comments; i.e. old comments still have the location listed.
If this bothers you, please go to
lj_releases and leave them a comment. I don't know if the staff reads the responses, but I don't think they're going to change this unless users protest.