[Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings

[Sebastian Moleski]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> That's pretty much exactly what I was going to say. The German
> Wikipedia is entitled to create whatever policies it likes as long as
> they don't go against global policy (and being more restrictive isn't
> against the global privacy policy) or against the fundamental
> principles of the movement. I think this policy is ridiculous
> (Sebastian's analogy to cookies is very unconvincing - the
> contributions page is already public, the analogy could be used to
> argue to the removal of all attribution, but if edits are going to be
> attributed (and, of course, they are) then the information is going to
> be public and making a rule that says only people with the time and
> technical expertise to write their own contributions analysis script
> are allowed access to contribution statistics doesn't make any sense
> to me at all), but it's not up to me.
>

That's not quite what the rule tries to accomplish. Rather, the point is
this: personal data being public does not allow anyone to aggregate such
data in a way such that the result is still tied to individual people (also
called 'profiling'). Why is that so? Because according to this German point
of view, people have the right to control what their personal data is being
used for. Since, when setting up an account on MediaWiki, there's no
explicit statement saying that your editing data may be aggregated in such a
manner, MediaWiki users didn't give permission to such aggregation and
therefore such aggregation may not take place. Therefore, such aggregation
without opt-in can't be published on German Wikipedia or on the Toolserver
(which is run by Wikimedia Deutschland and therefore subject to German law).

I understand that this position may seem odd to a lot of people, especially
if they come from the US or UK. I'm just stating a perception that is very
common here.

By the way, neither the original poster nor the discussion on German
Wikipedia implied that this point of view has to be applied to other wikis
like Meta or Spanish Wikipedia.

Best regards,

Sebastian