[Wikipedia-l] Creating an account and legal stuff

Thu Mar 23 02:13:35 UTC 2006

Matt Brown wrote:
> On 3/22/06, James D. Forrester <james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
> 
>>In the UK (EU?), it would be required upon us (the Foundation) to
>>require users (even anons) to explicitly accept the privacy implications
>>of their actions, and this is almost (?) always carried out with a
>>non-automatically set selection box on registration. Not sure if there's
>>any case law either way, but if there is and it is the only possible
>>way, then running a MediaWiki installation with anon editing, or user
>>editing without such a selection box or "I agree" button may well fall
>>foul of Data Protection legislation.
> 
> 
> In the US, where our servers are located, there is no such law, I believe.
> 
> Indeed, we have no hard and fast privacy policy for Wikipedia editors
> and admins to follow.  The policy we have is for the foundation and
> the software, not the users.  I suspect also the Foundation is very
> unkeen to do anything that implies a binding relationship between it
> and the users/admins.
> 
> -Matt

Why I was asking this was because a user insisted that I deleted his 
account, which is technically impossible. He could only have known that 
if he had read the privacy policy, which is only linked, in  a really 
tiny font, all the way at the bottom.

Ruud