Privacy policy: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 02:41, 13 November 2004

Note: this is a draft document intended to document the current consensus on the site's implicit privacy policy. Interested parties are encouraged to edit this page directly or comment in the talk page to help shape an explicit policy. If you make an edit here which is not the current practice, please clearly indicate that it is a change and post about it in talk. It is not a legal contract, and should not yet be taken as authoritative.

Summary

If you only read the Wikimedia project websites, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.

If you contribute to the Wikimedia projects, you are publishing every word you post publicaly. If you write something, assume that it will be retained forever. This includes articles, user pages and talk pages. Some limited exceptions are described below.

Publishing and public data

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see private logging below).

When you edit any page in the wiki, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.

If you are logged in, you will be identified by your user name. This may be your real name if you so choose, or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym, whatever user name you selected when you created your account.

If you have not logged in, the only identification of the author that we have is your network IP address. This is a series of four numbers which identifies the internet address from which you are contacting the wiki. Depending on your connection, this number may be traceable only to a large internet service provider, or specifically to your school, place of business, or home. It may be possible that the origin of this IP address could be used in conjunction with any interests you express implicitly or explicitly by editing articles to identify you even by private individuals.

It may be either difficult or easy for a motivated individual to connect your network IP address with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym. When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public, but it will be stored on the wiki servers for a relatively short amount of time. Thus it will be available to developers and may be released under certain circumstances (see below).

If you use a company mail server from home or telecommute and use a DSL or cable internet connection, it's likely to be very easy for your employer to identify your IP address and find all of your IP based Wikimedia projects contributions. Using a user name is a better way of preserving your privacy in this situation.

Deleting things from the Wikimedia projects does not really delete them. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any sysop/administrator, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Only a developer can permanently delete information from the Wikimedia projects and this is very unlikely to be done to protect privacy, except in response to legal action, or, possibly, in cases of harassment, which may be by a sysop toward another sysop?.

Private logging

Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of the Wikimedia projects to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.

These logs are used to produce the site statistics pages; the raw log data is not made public, and is normally discarded after about two weeks.

Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view:

64.164.82.142 - - [21/Oct/2003:02:03:19 +0000]
"GET /wiki/draft_privacy_policy HTTP/1.1" 200 18084
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia projects:Village_pump"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5"

Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems, in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site, or very rarely to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the wiki.

Policy on release of data derived from page logs

It is the policy of Wikimedia that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs will not be released by the developers who have access to it, except as follows:

In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
With permission of the affected user
To Jimbo Wales, his legal counsel, or his designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
To all curious/interested parties, sometimes except the user concerned, when it is believed that an IP address may be associated with a banned or otherwise abusive contributor, as part of the process of trying to determine whether this is in fact the case. because this has been done in the past - not sure if it will be in the future...

Wikimedia policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.

Policy regarding log retention

It is the policy of Wikimedia that server log information, including any backup copies, is destroyed within one year of its creation. Will this be retained longer for abuse/security issues or at the request of law enforcement?

E-mail

You may provide your e-mail address in your preferences. This allows other logged-in users may send email to you through the wiki (unless you disable this in your preferences). Your address will not be revealed to them unless you respond, or possibly if the email bounces. The email address may be used by Wikimedia to communicate with users on a wider scale.

If you do not provide an email address, you will not be able to reset your password if you forget it.

If you subscribe to one of the project mailing lists, your address will be exposed to any other subscriber. The list archives of most of Wikimedia's mailing lists are public, and your address may find itself quoted in messages.

The Wikimedia Foundation will not provide your email address to any third party.

Cookies

The wiki will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)

Removal of user accounts

User accounts, once created, can not be removed. However, it may be possible for a developer to change your username, but you need to make such arrangements yourself. There is no guarantee provided by the Wikimedia Foundation that a name will be changed on request. See Right to vanish for further details.

Whether specific user information is deleted is dependant on the deletion policies of the project that contains the information.

Passwords

Many aspects of the Wikimedia projects community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.

@@ Line 70: / Line 70: @@
 More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)
-== Right to Vanish ==
+== Removal of user accounts ==
+User accounts, once created, can not be removed. However, it may be possible for a developer to change your username, but you need to make such arrangements yourself. There is no guarantee provided by the Wikimedia Foundation that a name will be changed on request. See [[Right to vanish]] for further details.
-If you have used your real name, or a longstanding pen name, on Wikimedia projects then in principle everything you write can be traced to that name, and thus to you, as discussed above. However, if you decide to leave Wikimedia projects, there are a few steps that you can take to weaken that connection. They are:
+Whether specific user information is deleted is dependant on the deletion policies of the project that contains the information.
-# Change your username to some other name, one which is not directly associated with you (contact a developer).
-# Change references to your former username to be references to your replacement username (you can do this yourself).
-# Delete your user and user talk subpages (contact an administrator).
-# Replace your user page with a brief note indicating that you have left Wikimedia projects, and asking that people not refer to you by your name.
-You should note that while these measures afford a degree of practical obscurity, they will not stand up to assault from a persistent investigator, and Wikimedia projects has no control over its sublicensees, or over archiving services such as the Internet Archive or google. Further, these actions require a degree of co-operation from the user of the project, so Wikimedia cannot make guarantees on this matter. However, a few users have taken advantage of these kinds of measures in the past, and appear content with the results.
-See [[MeatBall:RightToVanish|right to vanish]] (meatballwiki)
-==Personal information deletion==
-The Wikimedia projects will delete personal information about contributors (most likely on on user and user talk pages) at their request, provided it is not needed for administrative reasons (which is generally limited to dealing with site misuse issues). Personal information about those who merit an encyclopedia article, when in the encyclopedia article, is not included in this. Personal information typically includes, but is not limited to, name, address, telephone number, instant messenger contact details, photograph, appearance, food tastes, political views and similar details of an individual person.
 ==Passwords==