On 3/22/06, James D. Forrester
<james(a)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