On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 11:38 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
On Saturday, 9 February 2013 at 20:08, Andy Mabbett wrote:
On 9 February 2013 18:39, Tom Morris <tom@tommorris.org (mailto:tom@tommorris.org)> wrote:
Now this has been transferred to Wikimedia UK, would it be possible to remove the access logging on QRpedia to ensure it complies with both the letter and spirit of the WMF privacy policy.
Is it possible to do that and retain the aggregated, anonymised statistics which GLAM institutions and others deploying QRpedia find useful? These may be analogous to Wikipedias page view stats.
That seems highly reasonable. The current issue is that the QRpedia database has a complete log of which IPs looked up which pages and when.
(Which is fine, I'm not blaming Roger or Terence. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do with something you are starting. This isn't a security hole or a privacy intrusion, it's a standard thing anyone would do when building a project like this. But now it has reached a point of maturity and is being taken under the wing of WMUK, we need to ensure that it is compliant with the expectations of Wikimedia users.)
We need to anonymise the access data, aggregate it and then delete the non-anonymised, non-aggregated data. I'm happy to fling code around and figure out a way to do this. I've had a look at the existing code and it's easy enough to understand. We could probably do with refactoring some of the code too.
I'd suggest that it would be best for WMUK to adhere completely with the Foundation's privacy policy (mentally substitute "chapter" and "WMUK" in the relevant places) even if the chapter is not formally bound by the Foundation policy (I'm not a movement policy wonk, I don't know). In addition, not holding on to access logs but only aggregate, anonymised data means that we minimise the potential for problems under the Data Protection Act or wider European data privacy law.
... that we resolve these kinds of issues in the next week or so (I rather prefer fixing issues when they exist only in my head rather than when people are shouting like maniacs). As I said, I'm happy to provide patches and code review in the next few days.
i'd highly appreciate this, many thanks tom! and thanks as well for reminding about policies, i suggested a task in the chapters association s task list to make clear(er) in the important policies if they should apply for the movement, and not only for the wmf: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Tasks
rupert.