On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Luis Villa <lvilla@wikimedia.org> wrote:
After reading through the thread, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and say simply that there was a misunderstanding here. There are a lot of deeply problematic issues with wikimetrics, but the idea that we'd try to stop this "feature" is nuts - pretending that it solves anything would be a distraction from the actual, more serious problems that legal has identified. There are enough things to blame us for already; please don't add more we're not responsible for. :)

I think that's entirely fair. 

It's a complicated situation, because we made this tool originally for users who had mostly signed contracts or employment agreements, who are legally bound to not only not reveal private data they have access to, and who are usually diligent about not being creepy with public data. Giving access to such a tool to the public is harder, and has the same potential pitfalls as basically all of Labs.  

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager