*We at the Wikimedia Foundation are pleased that organizations across the
world are currently rethinking their privacy policies. We have always
strongly valued the privacy of our volunteers, readers, and donors, but
this moment has given us an opportunity to look at our own privacy policy
and see how it can be strengthened.*
We see privacy as an important foundation for intellectual freedom, and we
believe that the trust of our community is deeply linked to several
practices:
* We intentionally collect very little data about readers and contributors,
and provide a transparent view of the data we keep—and do not keep.
* We work with our communities and invite open community vetting of our
privacy-related policies.
* We remain accountable to the community, including a volunteer ombudsman
commission that responds to any reported privacy-related concerns.
* We support our open source platform, which among other benefits, allows
anyone to examine and discover any vulnerabilities in our code.
We do not allow third-party tracking of visitors to our sites. We have
short data retention periods (see our data retention guidelines[1]).
We proactively publish a transparency report[2], informing the public about
requests for data about our contributors. We have a comprehensive privacy
policy[3], developed with community input.
We are always looking for ways to improve our privacy and data security
practices in partnership with our community of contributors and users.
As a result of our most recent review, we are updating our privacy policy,
which now clarifies the definition of “personal information,” and has been
reorganized to improve readability without changing the overall intentions
previously set by the community. As promised[4] in the policy, we are
providing these minor changes with three (3) calendar days’ prior notice.
These changes will go into effect on May 24, 2018. As always, we want your
thoughts and feedback, and invite everyone to comment on the policy talk
page[5] over the next thirty (30) calendar days. We are also grateful to
our volunteer community, who are actively working on translations of this
policy.
We will continue looking for ways to improve and help make clearer to
everyone our privacy practices and policy as technology and the world
change rapidly around us.
Look out for more updates, both here and on the Wikimedia-l mailing list,
to learn more about our approach to privacy and data security practices.
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_retention_guidelines
[2]
https://transparency.wikimedia.org/
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
[4]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy#Changes_to_This_Privacy…
[5]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Talk:Privacy_policy
--
Tony Sebro
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
tsebro(a)wikimedia.org
(415)839-6885 ext. 6784
*NOTICE: This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you
have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the
mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and ethical
reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community
members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more
on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*