[Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings

[wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk]

Robert Rohde wrote:
> Personally, I don't see any intrinsic problem with different wiki
> communities having different policies about what kinds of auxiliary
> content they will accept (as long as it doesn't interfere with the
> basic mission of the project).
> 
> I will say though that trying to control the ways that already public
> data might be aggregated is pretty unexpected from my American
> viewpoint.   It is also seems pretty clear that aggregation of edit
> statistics is perfectly acceptable within the larger WMF Privacy
> Policy.  Hence, I think the German Wikipedia community would find it
> nearly impossible to enforce their position on privacy with respect to
> the actions of most external third parties.  It even seems likely to
> me that if the same information appeared on EN or Meta, that they
> would have trouble finding a consensus for deletion within those
> communities.

Currently the data collection and processing doesn't follow its 
recommended code of good practice of the UKs DPA and may even be in 
breach of it:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/ebook/ebook.htm

One wonders what the response would be if a UK ISP published a list of 
all its users site visits.