The aggregation or representation of individual users editing habits such as what time they mostly edit and then overlapping these edits and times with other users is a violation of Toolserver privacy policy wether it is using the API, Database or otherwise because its information that reveals the users lifestyle (the time bit especially) and such information would not normally be so easily available especially if the user has 1000’s of edits.

Whether it is primarily used by SPI or not is irrelevant as at present you have no control over who views that info and for what purpose, you also seem to keep these reports wether the accounts within were socks or not.

I did not contact you directly as possible Privacy violations of any sort is a matter of interest for Toolserver Staff and other Toolserver users who may or may not run similar scripts.

Cheers,

Brett Hillebrand

User:Promethean @ en_wiki

ACC Developer

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From: toolserver-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:toolserver-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of John
Sent: Friday, 1 April 2011 9:22 PM
To: toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Cc: Platonides
Subject: Re: [Toolserver-l] Privacy Violation?

He has not, and the data collected via user-compare is generated solely via data collected from the API and almost exclusively used for  SPI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations where gathering and analyzing this data is standard practice. Had I been using non-public data (anything generated from the sql databases that normal users do not have access to) I would agree that there may be privacy issues, however every piece of data that is used for that tool comes from the en.wikipedia.org API.


Betacommand