Yes, In my view the issue is the "Normal edit time" by itself and more so when combined with specific edits so a time and topic range could also be established. Using such information you could say, quite accurately hypothesise what country the person is in and perhaps wether they worked or not among other habits. "Normal Edit Time" is a clear form of profiling as it is *calculated* on a *per user* basis using raw information and is not the raw information itself presented in different ways or with other raw information (Which is what the overlapping of contribution logs is).
The overlapping of contribution logs is relatively harm free as that is a way of looking at raw information that does not summarise, profile or otherwise reveal anything about an individual user not already there in plain text. Removing the Normal edit time would still allow the tool to be as useful as it is now. Cheers, Brett Hillebrand User:Promethean @ en_wiki ACC Developer This message and it's attachments may contain confidential information that is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Kinzler [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 1 April 2011 10:48 PM To: [email protected] Cc: Brett Hillebrand; John Subject: Re: [Toolserver-l] Privacy Violation? On 01.04.2011 13:41, Brett Hillebrand wrote: > 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. @Brett: Can you please specify what in the reports generated by betacommand you deem probelematic? Is it only the "Normal edit time" bit, or did I miss something? I think the main feature here is finding the co-authorship sets for two or three users. I think that by itself should generally be fine, though with some effort I could construct some case where it *might* compromise someones privacy... @John: would it significantly reduce the usefulness of your tool if you removed the "Normal edit time" bit? Also, could you throw away the reports on a regular basis, once they are no longer needed? I think that would already help a bit. > 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. Well, I'd recommend to talk to the person in question directly as a first option. Seems more friendly than screaming bloody murder right away. On the other hand, if someone is persistently violating policy, talking to the admins is of course the right thing to do. Regards, Daniel _______________________________________________ Toolserver-l mailing list ([email protected]) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
