[Foundation-l] Google Analytics on Wikimania site

[Dan Rosenthal]

I think you could very easily construe the foundation's knowledge and  
awareness of any google analytics code on the website as being either  
tacit acceptance (or inaction), or as being actually part of the  
software of the site (making it the foundation's use of the analytics  
program). You could probably argue that analytics and tracking code,  
as a user contribution, becomes the content of Wikipedia as an entity.

In any event it violates the spirit of our policy (we do not allow  
users to display potentially identifiable information of others, so  
why would we allow them to install analytics?). It's not something we  
really want to test, don't you think?

-Dan
On Oct 18, 2007, at 12:08 PM, Robert Rohde 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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