[Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Tisza Gergő<gtisza at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tisza Gergő <gtisza at ...> writes:
>> I do argue that it is not in violation of the privacy policy (whether
>> the people here find it acceptable is another question).
>
> Just to make it clear, I don't think accordance with the privacy policy
> automatically entitles one to do something. The PP is a minimum set of
> requirements strong enough to assure users and weak enough to not hinder
> ourselves (as it is difficult to change it); if something is permitted by the
> policy, but the WMF or the developers or the relevant community is against it,
> then it will not be done.

That's a reasonable view.

> So instead of talking about the privacy policy (which
> would be routinely violated if spread of IP data to non-WMF-owned servers would
> indeed be a violation - consider WikiMiniAtlas, for example) it would be more
> productive to talk about whether such a use is acceptable, and if not, what can
> be done to make it so.

Agreed.  This is a matter of a local project wanting to maintain a
long-standing feature or service without adverseley affecting anyone,
violating shared meta-community norms, or having to wait for
bottlenecks in centralized implementation.  It is very wiki to want to
find ways to fix things yourself.


> (For example, would it help if WM-HU took ownership? We
> could also write a complementary privacy policy for it, stating that it will
> never be used for any other reason than statistics, who has access, how long the
> raw logs are kept etc.)

Perhaps other messages in this thread will shed light here... I hear
people outside of hu:wp expressing a desire to centralize and maintain
a bottleneck for the simple reason that a bottleneck is easier to
police.

SJ