[Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings

[Sebastian Moleski]

Hi all,

to give a little insight here: about two years ago the German Wikipedia
community reached consensus that, for the page
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BZ (which is basically user
statistics and ranking), an opt-in is required. That means only those users
may be listed there who have added their name to
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Beitragszahlen/Opt-In.

The reasoning behind this approach is simple: just because a piece of
personal data is public, the aggregation of such data isn't automatically
also public. Why is that so? Because such aggregations can provide insights
into editing habits and other behavior of the person behind that user
account which touches on their privacy. A similar analogy is: just because
cookies exist and are public information from a website's perspective
doesn't make it acceptable to generate viewing profiles and analyzing
browsing patterns because that inforation touches the user's privacy.

Why did the German community decide this? Germans have traditionally (at
least since 1983) been particularly conscientious about personal privacy.
The constitutional court here even claimed a basic right to control how
one's personal data is used by others, regardless of whether that data is
made public or not at some point in time. Retrieving, storing, using,
aggregating, and publishing personal data is regulated by fairly strict laws
that typically require compelling reasons for such activities before they
are allowed - or the person's explicit permission.

Some of these principles have also been codified at the European Union level
under the subject of "data protection" so this isn't a strictly German
approach (anymore).

Hope that helps,

Sebastian