On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 11:32 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I'm a big fan of the GDPR and why it had to be created. (I'm doing a lot of the bureaucratic work on the tech side at the day job and am getting very used to thinking of ways something could constitute Personally Identifying Information.)
But I'm wondering how we'll approach it for the Wikimedia sites. Not just the log data - but the content.
We already have problems with Right To Be Forgotten, and well-cited content being removed from the search engines.
What do we have in place to deal with this when - not if - we get GDPR requests to remove information about a person from the site?
I don't mean just the letter of the law, in the EU or the US - I mean also, how we can handle this *right*. Because there are multiple competing legitimate interests here, and the editing communities tend to take a lot more care than they're strictly required to by law, because we are here to get things right. (This is why our DMCA numbers are ridiculously low for a top 10 site, for example.)
In general Wikipedia falls under the journalistic exemption ("publication of ideas, information or opinions"), which means many rules from the GDPR are dropped. Mostly what remains is just that a weighing has to be done between the subject's privacy interest and Wikipedia's own reporting interest. Even the possibility to object to that decision is dropped in this case, so if, as I assume will happen, such a request is taken as a reason to re-evaluate that decision, we are already going beyond the minimum of what the law requires.