[Foundation-l] New draft of privacy policy (urgent)

[Ryan]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 9:26 AM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Mike has written a new version of the privacy policy, taking into
> account comments made on meta and this list, until the 19th of June.
>
> You may find this new version here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Draft_Privacy_Policy_June_19_2008
>

First of all, thank you Florence and Mike for your work on this.

I noticed that it doesn't mention anywhere the possibility that the policy
may be altered in the future.  Most sites, including Yahoo and Google, do
so.  Is this omission accidental or deliberate?  Is such a mention either
necessary or encouraged legally?

In general, I agree with others that the policy might be worth splitting
up.  But if it isn't, I think it should be pruned.  For example, I'm looking
at Section VIII, Point C.  Why in the world is it necessary in a privacy
policy to specifically mention "badly-behaved web spiders" as a possible
reason for examining log data?

The mention of IRC is strange.  IRC is not a Wikimedia venue, so perhaps it
should be removed completely.  But if it is to be left, why was the mention
about the possible exposure of IPs deleted?  Surely that's an important
privacy concern regarding IRC (where the IRC guidelines have nothing to do
with privacy)

Section IV also reads more like a manual than a policy.  Perhaps that was
the intent, but I think more than anything, we should be informing our
users, not teaching them.

Perhaps my main point is this:

-- Yahoo privacy policy:  1,427 words
-- Google privacy policy:  1,858 words
-- Myspace privacy policy:  2,322 words
-- WMF current privacy policy:  1,767 words
-- WMF privacy policy draft:  5,081 words

A privacy policy should not be a TL;DR for the majority of our contributors,
even if a clear majority will never read it.  I imagine the ones that would
read it would appreciate (relative) brevity.

-- 
[[User:Ral315]]