Privacy policy debate gears up
On September 3, the Wikimedia Foundation launched the second stage of the process to improve the privacy policy implemented on most Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia, by publishing a policy draft.
The first round of deliberations started in mid-June with an open call for input, but was overshadowed by the PRISM debate. The overall aim is to replace the current, aging policy developed in 2008 by WMF's then-General Counsel Mike Godwin with one that accounts for changes in the legal and technological environment since then.
The second consultation broadly resembles the Terms of Use update in 2011–12, where more than 120 issues were examined over the course of several months. The legal department only released an English-language draft, while the new privacy policy draft was released in other languages as well: Arabic, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.
An early controversy was sparked by the attempt—novel in Wikimedia contexts—to use illustrations and jokes as part of the draft in an effort to expand the audience able and willing to read through the legal documents. Geoff Brigham, the foundation's current General Counsel, said in the related Meta debate that early A/B tests displaying the department's mascot, Rory, on banners calling for input indicate a higher click-through rate than for the conventional Foundation logo—including a 9:1 increase on Japanese Wikimedia sites.
The privacy policy draft is the most important part of a series of ongoing and upcoming legal documents to be scrutinized by the community. Alongside the main draft, the WMF has published a proposal for the access to non-public information policy, governing rights and duties of CheckUsers, support team members, and others in handling a wide range of issues. Future plans include data retention guidelines; a spelling out of the Foundation's data collection and retention practices under the new privacy policy; and a transparency report disclosing, among other things, how often the Foundation is approached by third parties to hand over user information, the sources of these demands, and how often the foundation complies.