Matt Brown wrote:
On 3/22/06, James D. Forrester james@jdforrester.org wrote:
In the UK (EU?), it would be required upon us (the Foundation) to require users (even anons) to explicitly accept the privacy implications of their actions, and this is almost (?) always carried out with a non-automatically set selection box on registration. Not sure if there's any case law either way, but if there is and it is the only possible way, then running a MediaWiki installation with anon editing, or user editing without such a selection box or "I agree" button may well fall foul of Data Protection legislation.
In the US, where our servers are located, there is no such law, I believe.
Indeed, we have no hard and fast privacy policy for Wikipedia editors and admins to follow. The policy we have is for the foundation and the software, not the users. I suspect also the Foundation is very unkeen to do anything that implies a binding relationship between it and the users/admins.
-Matt
Why I was asking this was because a user insisted that I deleted his account, which is technically impossible. He could only have known that if he had read the privacy policy, which is only linked, in a really tiny font, all the way at the bottom.
Ruud