On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Thomas Dalton <[email protected]>wrote:
> That's pretty much exactly what I was going to say. The German > Wikipedia is entitled to create whatever policies it likes as long as > they don't go against global policy (and being more restrictive isn't > against the global privacy policy) or against the fundamental > principles of the movement. I think this policy is ridiculous > (Sebastian's analogy to cookies is very unconvincing - the > contributions page is already public, the analogy could be used to > argue to the removal of all attribution, but if edits are going to be > attributed (and, of course, they are) then the information is going to > be public and making a rule that says only people with the time and > technical expertise to write their own contributions analysis script > are allowed access to contribution statistics doesn't make any sense > to me at all), but it's not up to me. > That's not quite what the rule tries to accomplish. Rather, the point is this: personal data being public does not allow anyone to aggregate such data in a way such that the result is still tied to individual people (also called 'profiling'). Why is that so? Because according to this German point of view, people have the right to control what their personal data is being used for. Since, when setting up an account on MediaWiki, there's no explicit statement saying that your editing data may be aggregated in such a manner, MediaWiki users didn't give permission to such aggregation and therefore such aggregation may not take place. Therefore, such aggregation without opt-in can't be published on German Wikipedia or on the Toolserver (which is run by Wikimedia Deutschland and therefore subject to German law). I understand that this position may seem odd to a lot of people, especially if they come from the US or UK. I'm just stating a perception that is very common here. By the way, neither the original poster nor the discussion on German Wikipedia implied that this point of view has to be applied to other wikis like Meta or Spanish Wikipedia. Best regards, Sebastian _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
