The aggregation or representation of individual users editing habits such as 
what time they mostly edit and then overlapping these edits and times with 
other users is a violation of Toolserver privacy policy wether it is using the 
API, Database or otherwise because its information that reveals the users 
lifestyle (the time bit especially) and such information would not normally be 
so easily available especially if the user has 1000’s of edits.

 

Whether it is primarily used by SPI or not is irrelevant as at present you have 
no control over who views that info and for what purpose, you also seem to keep 
these reports wether the accounts within were socks or not.

 

I did not contact you directly as possible Privacy violations of any sort is a 
matter of interest for Toolserver Staff and other Toolserver users who may or 
may not run similar scripts.

 

Cheers,

 

Brett Hillebrand

User:Promethean @ en_wiki

ACC Developer

 

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From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John
Sent: Friday, 1 April 2011 9:22 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: Platonides
Subject: Re: [Toolserver-l] Privacy Violation?

 

He has not, and the data collected via user-compare is generated solely via 
data collected from the API and almost exclusively used for  SPI 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations where 
gathering and analyzing this data is standard practice. Had I been using 
non-public data (anything generated from the sql databases that normal users do 
not have access to) I would agree that there may be privacy issues, however 
every piece of data that is used for that tool comes from the en.wikipedia.org 
API.


Betacommand

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