Last modified: 2011-04-25 23:35:21 UTC
In order to help alleviate many of the privacy concerns raised in Bug #19161, there should be a preference to disable auto-creation of accounts with GlobalAuth. To maintain the expectation of privacy, it should probably be set to disable auto-creation as the default.
I would actually suggest enabling auto-creation by default. The defaults should keep the majority of users in mind, and the majority of users would want their accounts created automatically (that's the purpose of the feature in the first place). New users would not care or know that their accounts were automatically created, so they probably wouldn't look for such an option nor would they want to disable it. People who have privacy concerns, likely the minority, are usually very "preference-savvy" and would tend to look for any settings to enable that would increase their privacy.
I agree with Casey. Moreover, this is currently useless because of bug 20852: if you don't want to autocreate accounts, you'll just avoid to login globally. This silly checkbox on login will be hopefully removed soon; if it's moved to Special:Preferences, though, it would be better to avoid to have multiple preferences about how SUL works (we already have too many preferences).
This depends on having global preferences (although unlike the normal case this would be a prefernce internal to centralauth). Delaying account creation seems easier to me. If what we want is a temporary fix, patch the policy.