Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation Board published the following Resolution:
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The Wikimedia Foundation Board affirms the value of freely licensed content, and we pay special attention to the provenance of this content. We also value the right to privacy, for our editors and readers as well as on our projects. Policies of notability have been crafted on the projects to limit unbalanced coverage of subjects, and we have affirmed the need to take into account human dignity and respect for personal privacy when publishing biographies of living persons.
However, these concerns are not always taken into account with regards to media, including photographs and videos, which may be released under a free license although they portray identifiable living persons in a private place or situation without permission. We feel that it is important and ethical to obtain subject consent for the use of such media, in line with our special mission as an educational and free project.* We feel that seeking consent from an image's subject is especially important in light of the proliferation of uploaded photographs from other sources, such as Flickr, where provenance is difficult to trace and subject consent difficult to verify.*
In alignment with these principles, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees urges the global Wikimedia community to:
- Strengthen and enforce the current Commons guideline on photographs of identifiable peoplehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people with the goal of requiring evidence of consent from the subject of media, including photographs and videos, when so required under the guideline. The evidence of consent would usually consist of an affirmation from the uploader of the media, and such consent would usually be required from identifiable subjects in a photograph or video taken in a private place. This guideline has been longstanding, though it has not been applied consistently. - Ensure that all projects that host media have policies in place regarding the treatment of images of identifiable living people in private situations. - Treat any person who has a complaint about images of themselves hosted on our projects with patience, kindness, and respect, and encourage others to do the same.
Approved 10-0. ---o0o---
Now, I am aware of a particular set of photographs on Commons, taken in a private situation. They were taken from Flickr by an anonymous contributor and uploaded to Commons. The images are no longer available on Flickr, having been removed long ago.Over the past year, the photographer has requested several times via OTRS that Commons delete these images. He said that the subjects could not understand how these images of them ended up on Commons, and were aghast to find them there. They were never meant to be released publicly. According to the deletion discussions, OTRS verified that the person making the request was indeed the owner of the Flickr account. Yet Commons administrators have consistently, through half a dozen deletion discussions, refused to delete the images, disregarding the objections of isolated editors who said that hosting the images in the clear absence of subject consent runs counter to policy. Closing admins' argument has been that licenses once granted cannot be revoked. Yet according to the above resolution, Commons should not be hosting these images. Not only was consent not obtained – an endemic situation – the images are kept even though consent has been expressly denied.Why are these images still on the Wikimedia Foundation server? I am happy to pass further details on to any WMF staff, steward or Commons bureaucrat who is willing and able to review the deletion requests and OTRS communications, and remove the images permanently. Andreas