I agree with ACN's points, especially the lack of community review and
discussion.
For example, in section 4.1 on prohibited uses it refers to "Do not break
the law", but fails to specify which law, so as written it applies to all
laws anywhere enacted by a competent legislative body. Congratulations:
it's now a breach of the WMCS ToS to criticise repressive regimes,
comparing heads of state to literary figures, and any number of things the
suppression of which is in contravention of the movement values.
Section 6.2 says "if WMCS administrators fail to reach you within six (6)
weeks". That's a pretty onerous time limit for volunteers. Being busy IRL,
or in hospital, or… for six weeks is not uncommon and in no way indicates a
stable tool is abandoned. Needing to take emergency measures more quickly
(like shutting down the VMs) for security issues or the like is an
orthogonal concern.
7.2 says Toolforge projects (but not other projects for some reason) must "Use
any user agent information … only for the maintenance of your Toolforge
Project". Maintenance of the project does not include content negotiation,
progressive enhancement, and other functional aspects. Depending on what
definition you apply to "user agent information" (since "user agent"
is not
defined anywhere) this could include authentication headers for e.g. Basic
auth, or just the HTTP User-Agent header field, or any information about
the user agent (like screen resolution, technical capabilities, supported
content types or javascript features).
Section 7.3.1 requires all projects that collect personal information to
post a privacy policy (and other things). Since section 2 (definitions)
defines "user agent" to be personal information equivalent to your
password, social security number, real name, and bank account number and
information about the user agent is provided to all projects by the
anonymising proxy, all projects are by definition collecting personal
information. All projects with a web interface are thus required to post a
full privacy policy. The definition of "End User" does not exclude the
developer / project admin, so all projects without a web interface are also
required to post a full privacy policy. If all projects are actually
required to post a privacy policy it would be much much simpler to have the
policy just say "All projects must post a privacy policy".
There is no definition of "collecting" so what technical operations
actually constitute "collecting personal information" is unclear.
There is no definition of "user agent" so it is unclear whether it is
intended to encompass all information provided by the user's User Agent
(i.e. web browser), all information _about_ the user's User Agent, or just
the content of the User-Agent HTTP header. This also makes the term "user
agent information" ambiguous. (Also, please please explain to WMF Legal
that the HTTP User-Agent header isn't PII by any reasonable definition.
I've tried and failed miserably. This is more-catholic-than-the-pope
privacy IMO, and I work with the GDPR in my day job).
Deferring a central part of such a policy to a second policy (x-site
policy) that does not yet exist and is explicitly still subject to change
is akin to writing blank checks or signing a blank contract. It is also
quite possibly grounds for invalidating the whole policy as obviously
unreasonable in contract law terms.
All these things are, from my perspective, fairly problematic, and most of
them probably pretty fixable if the community was consulted. That some of
them may possibly be harder to fix is not really a good reason to not at
least discuss them.
Cheers,
Xover
On Sat, May 27, 2023 at 5:29 AM AntiCompositeNumber <
anticompositenumber(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I am disappointed that these Terms went into effect
immediately,
without any chance for review or comment by the community. This is
counter to how Wikimedia processes should run, and flies in the face
of the values of the Wikimedia movement.
I am concerned about some of the provisions of these Terms. For
example, 7.3 bullet 3 states
Not collect any other Personal Information and
Wikimedia Usernames from
End Users, other than any user agent information forwarded
by the
anonymizing reverse proxy or OAuth provided usernames and email addresses.
One of my tools,
signatures.toolforge.org, provides data on a user's
signature from their username. The queried username is included in the
path, and is logged by the default uwsgi logging configuration. It is
likely that at least some End Users will check their own usernames, so
therefore the tool is collecting Wikimedia Usernames from End Users.
This *shouldn't* be a violation of the Terms, but by a plain reading
of them, it is.
I am also concerned that
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Cloud_Services_Terms_of_use#5.…
makes reference to a non-existent policy and refers to itself with a
different title.
I am also disappointed that the revised Terms still require tools to
be under an OSI-compliant license, without permitting the use of CC-0
or public domain grants. The requirement to request and be granted an
exemption to run one-off scripts without releasing them also seems too
arduous to be useful. Either free licenses should be required for
everything, or the approval requirement should be dropped.
The warning at the top should also make clear that developer email
addresses are public to the Internet, not merely to other WMCS users
(for example, at <https://ldap.toolforge.org/user/anticomposite>).
The overall layout of the Terms is also confusing, with very short
sections referring to other very short sections on the other side of
the document.
AntiCompositeNumber
(he/him)
On Fri, May 26, 2023 at 9:46 AM Andrew Bogott <abogott(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
After nearly a decade of mishap and delay, we have updated the WMCS
terms of use. The updated document for toolforge and cloud-vps admins
can be found here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Cloud_Services_Terms_of_use
and the terms of use for visitors to WMCS sites can be found here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Cloud_Services_End_User_Terms_…
There is one significant change in these terms: Cloud-vps projects which
collect personal data will need to include an explicit privacy policy
for their projects. This is section 7.3. For other WMCS users and admins
these documents do not represent any significant change in policy, but
do clarify and finalize many things that were poorly-worded in the
previous TOU, or policies that we have enforced informally without
officially stating.
Please feel free to reach out to WMCS staff if you find any part of
these documents concerning or disruptive to your work on our platforms.
-Andrew
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