On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 01:53 +0200, Florence Devouard
wrote:
Hello,
During the last board meeting, the board approved the following resolution
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will amend its privacy policy
to notify, when possible, those members of the community whose
personally identifiable data has been sought through, or produced as a
result of, civil or criminal legal process, except when such
notification is forbidden by state or federal law in the United States
of America.
This change of policy was suggested early march by Nsk92, following the
Video Professor incident.
Cool. I remember this either at the time it came up, or some other
earlier incident which resulted in such a proposal.
Question : will the notification occur before WMF actually produce the
information so that the member of the community can challenge the
information request through whatever legal process that may be available
to them?
The resolution covers both the case where information has only "been
sought", as well as where it has been "produced" already. It also
acknowledges that in some cases the notice itself may be forbidden
(compare the recent news story about the Internet Archive, which
successfully resisted an FBI attempt to extract information, but was
forbidden to disclose it while the matter was being litigated).
Otherwise, clearly we would prefer to notify affected parties prior to
producing information, but given the varied circumstances that might
lead to such a request, we cannot promise this in every situation.
--Michael Snow