[Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings

[Shane Simmons]

>The issue is the aggregation and collation of the data and making it
>available to others. Why would you consider that some one's edit history
>is any less personal than what they borrow from the library?

...

>Why so? Editing history reveals your interests, maybe your politics,
>perhaps your religious affiliations, your ethnicity. A whole range of
>personal data can be mined from 1000s of edits. It may reveal
>associations with other users, and networks of users. Those groupings
>may then be traced into social networks like facebook, or linkin.

If you borrowed books from a library with the reasonable expectation of
privacy, and such data was made public, I can see the issue.
However, if you borrowed books from an open and public source, (
bookcrossing.com comes to mind) which shows you, and everyone else, every
book you've logged into the site, you really can't reasonably expect
privacy.

Rule in thumb: If you can see it about another user, they can see it about
you. On all WMF wikis, even without signing in, you could manually compile a
list of all pages edited by a certain user, at what date and time, and what
words were added to the articles, so on and so forth. If you don't want
people to see this information about you... Don't edit. Plain and simply,
really. By creating an account and continuing to edit, you forgo any
expectation of privacy with the same data. Just my two cents. :)

-User:Avicennasis