Talk:Submissions/Wikipedia and the evolving world of privacy regulation

From Wikimania 2014 • London, United Kingdom

Maybe, but the abstract needs more information before a decision can be made. Geraldshields11 (talk) 21:55, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia (and Wikimedia projects in general) are actually in a much more secure place with respect to most privacy regimes than operations like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, because Wikimedia does not seek to acquire any personal information about its users. Commercial enterprises frequently endeavor to acquire such information, because the information itself has commercial value.
The only circumstances where personal identity becomes important is where a) editors voluntarily disclose their personal identity, and other editors seek to take advantage of this information in some way (usually in the course of on-wiki discussion); b) editors seek to unearth the identity of other editors by pursuing information not disclosed by the other editor on-wiki (for example, searching for use of a handle in off-wiki discussion forums); and c) Checkuser activities to address situations where evidence of sockpuppetry exists.
Many countries now have laws that govern the practices of entities which collect personal information, requiring these entities to employ various safeguards to protect this information and to notify affected individuals of security breaches wherein personal information is acquired by unauthorized parties. When you see on the news that a department store or credit card company has been hacked, and information from tens of thousands or millions of customers has been compromised, the reason that is being reported is that the company is required by law to inform the public of the breach. There are, of course, old common-law regimes of privacy law that are still in effect, and which are the sort of rules that require us to redact certain kinds of non-public information if this information was posted on a Wikipedia page, or in an edit summary (which we would do anyway). BD2412 (talk) 17:41, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the clarity. Geraldshields11 (talk) 02:03, 17 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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