--- Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that the privacy policy is there for all users, anonymous or not. WE do not log what people read. We leave that to our respective governments.if they care to. My question is what the added value is to adding more cruft to each and every article people read? What is the added value? I do not think that adding all kinds of everything to every page is a good idea. I prefer a clean crisp look. I prefer that all relevant information is readily available from apropriate pages like a help page, a user portal..
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.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that the privacy policy is there for all users, anonymous or not. WE do not log what people read. We leave that to our respective governments.if they care to. My question is what the added value is to adding more cruft to each and every article people read? What is the added value? I do not think that adding all kinds of everything to every page is a good idea. I prefer a clean crisp look. I prefer that all relevant information is readily available from apropriate pages like a help page, a user portal..
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.
-- mav
Hoi, If that is your point, you do not adress mine. My point is that we do not need to say this on every page viewed. It is cruft that we can do without. I agree that we need to tell our readers. Doing this on every page is excessive. Thanks, GerardM
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.
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.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales (jwales@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.
Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that the privacy policy is there for all users, anonymous or not. WE do not log what people read. We leave that to our respective governments.if they care to. My question is what the added value is to adding more cruft to each and every article people read? What is the added value? I do not think that adding all kinds of everything to every page is a good idea. I prefer a clean crisp look. I prefer that all relevant information is readily available from apropriate pages like a help page, a user portal..
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.
We actually do track what specific IPs do on our site, and we use this for a number of purposes that some people might or might not like. (For example, checking for sock puppeting.)
Any change to the privacy policy would have to be worded very carefully so as not to make promises that we can't deliver. I prefer instead that our privacy policy warn people that we aren't really the sort of organization that is set up very well to protect people's privacy. As a matter of fact, we don't particularly care what people are doing on the site (as long as they aren't causing trouble somehow), but it is hard for us to make strong guarantees that we aren't tracking people or looking at what they are doing.
--Jimbo
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