[Foundation-l] Privacy policy and editing anonymously notice.

[Jean-Baptiste Soufron]

Actually, most laws only require us to record connection informations 
for a limited amount of time. I know that the delay is not established 
in France as of today, but 1 year is commonly accepted. Still, many 
lobbyists are asking for a 3 years delay in the next legislations.

JBS, Legal Maven

Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As the Board have been rather slow with publicising the new privacy 
>> policy, I have taken the step of adding a notice to the bottom of 
>> [[MediaWiki:Copyrightstext]] on the English-language Wikipedia (the 
>> text which is displayed when you click "Edit this page"), which 
>> mentions that if you are editing anonymously, your IP address will be 
>> publically and permanently associated with the edits, and if you're 
>> editing while logged in, your IP address will be stored for around 2 
>> weeks.
>>
>> Someone has also added a link to the privacy policy on the bottom of 
>> every page.
>>
>> I urge admins on all the various projects to update their project with 
>> this information - make it clear that editing will mean that some 
>> personally-identifiable information is kept about the contributor.
>>
>> Chris
> 
> As a matter of policy is this reasonable?  I'm just thinking out loud 
> here, but might it be reasonable after a certain length of time that 
> anonymous edits from IP addresses could be turned into simply a user 
> with the name "Anonymous" instead?  It would require a minor change in 
> MediaWiki, but I don't think it is that difficult of a challenge 
> technically.
> 
> I'm raising this here to suggest that perhaps another policy could ben 
> enacted for anonymous users.  After a year or so it would be very 
> difficult to even find logs to claim that you used a particular IP 
> address unless it was on a permanent IP table for an organization and 
> somehow dated.  Besides, we are using IP addresses anyway to help 
> distinguish trolls from honest contributors who are trying to add 
> reasonable content but just want to stay anonymous.  Why not purge these 
> IP address records as well?  I'm talking about the social policy aspect 
> of doing this, not actually implementing this in MediaWiki software.
>