[Foundation-l] Privacy concerns

Sat Jul 9 10:46:09 UTC 2011

On 9 July 2011 11:02, Béria Lima <berialima at gmail.com> wrote:

> The WMF is not responsible for private mails you send to anyone. The only
> people who "officialy" can receive a copy of any ID you may have are
> Philippe <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Philippe_%28WMF%29>,
> Christine<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Christine_%28WMF%29>or
> Megan <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mhernandez>. If you send a copy
> of your ID to anyone else is not WMF problem.

I do think it is absolutely a problem when people on a WMF-hosted wiki
are using an unofficial mechanism to demand copies of people's
passports.

Note that WMF does not allow local communities to do other things that
would violate the privacy policy, such as run Google Analytics, even
if the local community is all for it.

When passports are requested of people on the wiki, does the requester
stress that this is not WMF-official, not covered by the privacy
policy and there is no official oversight whatsoever of the mechanism?

It looks to me like Huib has alerted us to a potentially disastrous
privacy time bomb.

- d.