[Wikimedia-l] Geolocalization improvement proposal

[Cristian Consonni]

2012/7/24  <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>:
> On Jul 24, 2012, at 11:14 AM, Cristian Consonni <kikkocristian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2012/7/24  <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>:
>>> [...] So I definitely believe what it.WM wants to do, to connect people with local events, has real value. And that it has value for the individual people just as much as for it.WM.
>>
>> strong +1.
>>
>>> The main question is whether the benefit from being able to connect people with local events is worth the risk of collecting more personalized of their data than we are accustomed to handling.
>>
>> I could be wrong but I don't think we would "handle more data" than
>> what we are doing now. We are not going to use that data and as far as
>> I know that data "dies" in the moment the system has output the
>> message.
>
> Maybe this is the area that needs more study. And I am probably the wrong person to try and even formulate technical questions, but is there a way to make use of this data without storing it? Without even knowing who recieved what personalized messages, unless, of course,they choose to respond?

I will forward these questions to wikitech-l.

> There is still the "creep" factor, in that readers of the messages will not necessarily know that it was all handled blindly. However it should technically preserve the reader's privacy, if no person nor computer can recall what messages any person was presented with. And if an FAQ is well-linked, anyone who under the misperception that it was handled invasively can learn how serious we are about the subject.

A FAQ page would be useful, then I think we could decide that, for example:
* the geonotice can be centered only on big cities (e.g. "Chef-lieus")
* Messages should not make use of the geolocalization information
itself, but only static test (i.e. NO "Hey you living in X, there a
meetup in Milan" -  YES for "There's meetup in Milan")

> If such a thing is even possible I suppoose it becomes a sort of philosophical question. If no one nor computer can know whether or not you recieved a personally targeted message is the targeting invasive of your privacy?

yes, that's pretty much my point, I think nobody is interested to know
if somebody has seen a geotarget message or not, my point is about
making people from Milan (north of Italy) know that there is a local
meetup without bothering people from Rome (center) or Palermo (south
of Italy). (please note that with the current system we were not even
able to accurately distinguish betwen macro-regions as
north/center/south Italy)

Cristian