Jimmy Wales (jwales(a)wikia.com) [050430 02:55]:
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>>The point is that many sites *do* track where
specific IPs do on their sites.
>>We need to tell readers that we don't do that - that we respect their
privacy.
> As far as I know we *do* do that, it's
recored in the webserver and/or
> cache logs along with other per-hit data.
Yes. It's just that we store it as bulk data and
don't really care what
people are looking at individually. The developers are trusted not to
go snooping into other people's reading habits, but there is absolutely
no way for us to guarantee that they aren't doing it.
But then, the same holds for the sysadmins of *any* website, particularly a
top 100 site - the sysadmins, as the ones responsible for tending the
machinery, will look through the logs as the task of keeping the site
running requires; whether to optimise things for the pattern of usage or to
track noteworthy abusers. That's what sysadmins are for. No privacy policy
can reasonably be taken to mean otherwise.
Ours are notably picky on who gets access to the confidential info, which
is reassuring :-)
This was a question that came up just today, actually - I was doing a
Special:CheckUser sockpuppet check on an IP. It turned out to be someone
with a username using their IP as a sockpuppet and pretending it was a
different person. I sanity-checked with Tim Starling and he agreed that if
it's relevant, and they're sock-puppeteering (they were), then revealing
the user-IP link is something they can't reasonably object to. I'd say that
if the privacy policy seems to say otherwise, the privacy policy needs
fixing. That's almost certainly a Foundation matter, of course, so I've
cc'ed this to that list.
- d.