[Foundation-l] Google Analytics on Wikimania site

[\Mike]

As one of the "99.9% of the Internet population
[who] are not smart enough to selectively block
Google analytics" as Brian wrote in another mail*
(http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-October/034097.html)
I'd like to say that it for most people would
seem quite strange, if the present privacy policy
allowed 'collected information' to be sent on to
a third party, provided it doesn't first take the
detour through the WMF servers. So if there is
such a loophole - even the suspicion of such a
loophole - we ought IMHO to rewrite the policy
pretty much immediately. 


\Mike

*I had - and still have - no clue about how to do
that, and I wouldn't say that's due to lack of
intelligence on my part, but due to lack of
investigating what are the possibilities, and
predicting that such investigating would ever be
necessary.


--- Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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