Chris Jenkinson wrote:
We had a rather large discussion today on privacy and its application on Wikipedia (specifically anonymous editing and the checkuser tool which is the subject of much debate at the moment).
That's two distinct issues:
* If you contribute to the wiki without creating an account, your edits are publicly identified with your network location instead of a name.
* Private internal logs associate for a limited time all edits with the network location they were made from, and a small number of trusted people have access to this information for the purpose of investigating misuse of the service.
I am curious to whether the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy is compatible with EU legislation on privacy (which is tightly regulated), and whether it is obliged to be, as the Foundation hosts servers in the European Union (which are presumably subject to EU law).
I've been asking this for years... Check South Korea's laws as well, as we have servers there too.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)