I see the actions as 100% public. Just because the edit that was attempted
was not allowed does not mean it was not meant to be public. The "Logs" are
just another avenue that an edit may take if it meets some conditions. the
only difference between logging and previous behavior is the edit never made
it to the "live" page. this is very similar to flagged revisions behavior of
not showing an edit until its approved.
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:35 AM, John at Darkstar <vacuum(a)jeb.no> wrote:
It is not refusing to accept some kind of edit that
creates the problem,
it is the logging of the action because you then collect information
about the users. Preventing the vandalism instead of reacting to it
shifts the actions from a public context to a private context. By
avoiding collecting such information and adhering to "administration of
the system" most of the problem simply goes away. Its not about using or
not using the extension, its about limiting the logging so that no one
can gain access to any data to make later actions against the users (ie.
the vandals).
WMF may choose to log the information anyhow, like it may choose to not
respect copyright laws in some countries. I don't think that is very
wise, but I can only say what I believe is right.
John
Nathan skrev:
The peculiarity in some respects of Scandinavian
law seems to come up on
this list fairly frequently, but it's usually short on specifics or
actual
cases. John, do you have any specific references
to what you've described
as
a problem?
Adhering to your interpretation on the possible limits on "private"
information would effectively eliminate the abuse filter as a useful
tool.
I'm having a hard time seeing this as a
widespread problem; there can't
be
many jurisdictions that define public and private
in this way, or place
such
restrictions on what can be done with this data
that blocking someone
from a
private website in another country could be a
violation of the law.
To my mind, private data of the sort we need to worry about is not
"private"
in the sense that it is owned by the Foundation
or not publicly viewable,
but "private" in the sense that it contains potentially sensitive details
of
individual editors and readers. Nothing in the
abuse filter would seem to
change the public availability of this sort of data, and I can hardly see
Wikimedia being penalized simply for preventing vandalism instead of
reacting to it.
Nathan
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 8:35 AM, John at Darkstar <vacuum(a)jeb.no> wrote:
The problem is that something that previously was
public (vandal moving
the page "George W. Bush" to "moron") will now be private (he get a
message that hi isn't allowed to do that), this shifts the context from
a public context to a private context. Then the extension do logging of
actions done in this private context to another site. Users of this site
will then have access to private information. It is not the information
_disclosed_ which creates the problem, it is the information
_collected_. It seems like the information is legal for "administrative
purposes", but as soon as it is used for anything other it creates a lot
of problems. For example, if anyone takes actions against an user based
on this collected information it could be a violation of local laws.
(Imagine collected data being integrated with CU) If such actions must
be taken, then the central problems are identification of who has access
to the logs and are they in fact accurate. That is something you don't
want in a wiki with anonymous contributors! :D
The only solution I see is to avoid all logging of private actions if
the actions themselves does not lead to a publication of something.
Probably it will be legal to do some statistical analysis to administer
the system, but that should limit the possibility of later
identification of the involved users.
There are a lot of other problems, but I think most of them are minor to
this.
John
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