[Foundation-l] Google Analytics on Wikimania site

[Robert Rohde]

On 10/18/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On 10/18/07, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What's the big deal?
>
> It's in violation of:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy


Having just reread the privacy policy, I think that's debatable.  Mostly
because this scenario appears to be largely outside the scope of what was
considered when writing the policy.

The analytics code instructs a visitor's web browser to communicate with
Google servers in a way that will provide Google with various user specific
information.  However, the privacy policy is built around what the WMF will
do with user information, and since the WMF is technically neither
collecting nor controlling the information being sent to Google, it is not
clear to me that the privacy policy, as currently written, actually
considers this situation.

I'm not sure whether having Analytics active is reasonable or not, but in my
reading, the privacy policy is largely mute when it comes to facilitating
third parties in the independent collection of user data.

Perhaps the closest thing to a restriction is:

"Wikimedia will not sell or share private information, such as email
addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information,
or it is required by law to release the information."

But directing a web browser to access an external site that then collects
information on it's visitors could well be understood as something other
than "sharing private information" since WMF neither provided nor collected
the information.  I assume the real intent, at the time this phrase was
written was to prevent disclosures of information WMF has directly collected
and controls.

In the spirit that a privacy policy ought to explicitly describe all allowed
uses of user data, perhaps it is reasonable to say that Analytics uses ought
to be forbidden by virtue of the fact that they are not explicitly allowed.
However, the privacy policy also seems to strangely omit any statement to
the effect that uses of user data are limited only to scenarios covered by
the policy.  Some individual sections may have that effect, but the policy
itself never actually says it is a comprehensive description of how user
data may be used (even though I assume it was intented to be comprehensive).

-Robert Rohde