[Labs-l] Discussion needed: Technically feasible, legally okay... but want tools do we want?

[Ryan Lane]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:48 AM, Johannes Kroll
<johannes.kroll at wikimedia.de>wrote:

> Just to prevent some possible misunderstandings... :-)
>
> I'm not arguing for less privacy. I'm saying that forcing this one tool
> to use "opt-in" would not give you more privacy. It would only force
> the "bad" people to abuse the data in a less obvious way, for example
> by copying the tool to another account and commenting out any opt-in
> related code. This is trivial to do.
>
> If you are concerned about the data you generate on Wikipedia, you
> should argue that either the data should not be stored (which probably
> isn't technically feasible since it is needed for other reasons), or
> not made publically available via the DB replication and the API. I
> think this is an important discussion because profiling Wikipedia edits
> can really tell you a *lot* about a person. More control for individual
> users over how their data is stored and made available via the API
> and DB would be a very good thing.
>
>
There's absolutely nothing we can do here. We can't stop providing dumps
and the dumps are all you need to build a tool like this. Editing history
is completely public and needs to be to fulfill our license. Telling people
they can't run tools like this may stop the tools for a while, but if
someone wants to be abusive, they'll download the dumps and host it outside
of Labs.

- Ryan
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