Ombuds commission/2025/Temporary Accounts

On 17 March 2025, the Ombuds Commission published the following public statement:

Dear Checkuser,

Temporary accounts (hereafter: TA) are coming. While we currently have only limited experience with the feature, based on initial deployments, the Ombuds Commission is issuing this preliminary guidance to all checkusers. Under TA, when a user makes an edit while not logged in, their IP address will be hidden from casual view. Instead, an account with a name similar to ~2025-1234567 will be created and all edits performed by the same IP address and browser (with some attempt to track a user as they move from one IP to another) for the next 90 days will be assigned to that account. After 90 days, the account will expire and a new one will be created. That's just a high-level overview; the T&S documentation for the feature should be consulted for more details.

Of particular interest to checkusers is that there will be a mechanism by which some users can see the underlying IP address(es) associated with a TA, and not everybody who has this access will be a signatory to the ANPDP. This means that publicly connecting a TA to a registered account will expose private data to users who are not authorized to see it. Checkusers should thus avoid connecting temporary accounts to a registered account in exactly the same way they now avoid connecting any private data obtained from the checkuser tool with a registered account.

This is an evolving landscape. If the technical details of how TA works change from our current understanding and/or we get more experience with the feature, we may issue additional guidance. In the meantime, we urge all checkusers, when faced with a new situation that they do not have experience with, to exercise caution and take the most conservative approach possible to any disclosures of account data.