[Foundation-l] privacy policy update

[Michael Snow]

Kwan Ting Chan wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 01:53 +0200, Florence Devouard wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>>
>> During the last board meeting, the board approved the following resolution
>>
>> The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will amend its privacy policy 
>> to notify, when possible, those members of the community whose 
>> personally identifiable data has been sought through, or produced as a 
>> result of, civil or criminal legal process, except when such 
>> notification is forbidden by state or federal law in the United States 
>> of America.
>>
>>
>> This change of policy was suggested early march by Nsk92, following the 
>> Video Professor incident. 
>>     
>
>
> Cool. I remember this either at the time it came up, or some other
> earlier incident which resulted in such a proposal. 
>
> Question : will the notification occur before WMF actually produce the
> information so that the member of the community can challenge the
> information request through whatever legal process that may be available
> to them?
>   
The resolution covers both the case where information has only "been 
sought", as well as where it has been "produced" already. It also 
acknowledges that in some cases the notice itself may be forbidden 
(compare the recent news story about the Internet Archive, which 
successfully resisted an FBI attempt to extract information, but was 
forbidden to disclose it while the matter was being litigated). 
Otherwise, clearly we would prefer to notify affected parties prior to 
producing information, but given the varied circumstances that might 
lead to such a request, we cannot promise this in every situation.

--Michael Snow