On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:36 AM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
- The report specifically addresses the two stars Wikimedia "missed,"
stating that (1) it plans to publish a transparency report in July and (2)
should not be judged poorly for not having had the right opportunity to
defend users in court the way the report defines it.
On the second point: we regularly defend user privacy and we regularly defend users in court. Because of this, we have never taken a privacy issue to court - so far, we have always been able to talk them out of it or convince them it is not worth the trouble before it gets that far. We are successful at this because (1) we have a very good record of winning court cases, so they do not have a good chance of winning and (2) we collect so little user information, and we delete it quickly, so we are usually able to convince them that they won't get anything useful from us even if they did win.
But the report specifically requires us to defend user privacy in court. This makes sense for EFF: they need a public court record to "prove" that we have defended user privacy. But it doesn't make sense for us: we don't get credit for all the times that we have privately protected user privacy and saved the user (and the Foundation's budget!) from going to court.
So really we hope next year to get only five stars - because I hope to again win *before* court in these cases. We'll see- I'm sure someday someone will be stupid, and we'll win, and then we'll get our sixth star ;)
A big thanks goes out to Michelle Paulson, and several other folks on the team including Yana Welinder, for getting us our stars!
Luis (like Cristian and at least 1/2 of the lawyers on the team, also an EFF member)