[Foundation-l] Privacy policy and editing anonymously notice.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron
jbsoufron at gmail.com
Thu Oct 27 16:31:18 UTC 2005
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.
>
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