FIRST DRAFT AND BRAINSTORMING TOPIC ONLY

from wikipedia:

"A privacy policy is a legal document that is dealing with the informations related to customer's and merchant's private profiles. Such examples could be the instance of a website providing information about the use of personal information - particularly personal information collected via the website - by the website owner. Privacy policies usually contain details of what personal information is collected, how the personal information may be used, the persons to whom the personal information may be disclosed, the security measures taken to protect the personal information, and whether the website uses cookies and/or web bugs.

The exact contents of a privacy policy will depend upon the applicable law. For instance, there are significant differences between the EU data protection and US data privacy laws.

Some websites also define their privacy policies using P3P or Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA), allowing browsers to automatically assess the level of privacy offered by the site."

Privacy Policy Draft Version:

Privacy Policy Discussion Area (Q&A):

Foswiki Privacy Policy

The content of this page is an official policy approved by the Foswiki Association Board. This policy may not be circumvented, eroded, or ignored on local Foswiki projects.

This version of the Privacy policy was approved on {date} by the Foswiki Association Board. Discussion and proposed changes are welcome on the PrivacyPolicyDraft topic.

It is requested that this notice is translated and linked from the footer of every page.

Contents

Summary

If you only read the Foswiki project websites, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.

If you contribute to the Foswiki projects, you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something, assume that it will be retained forever. This includes articles, user pages and talk pages. Some limited exceptions are described below.

Publishing on the wiki and public data

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see private logging below).

When you edit any page in the wiki, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.

Identification of an author

To you publish a page in the wiki, you must be logged in. As such, you will be identified by your user name. This must be your real name as stated in the Terms Of Use. When you create or edit any page on the web site, your user name is associated with that action, and will be displayed on the changes history for the page.

Remember to log out when accessing the web site through a shared computer, to avoid allowing others to use your identity.

Cookies Need someone more knowledgeable about TWiki and Cookies to help here

The wiki will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)

Passwords

Many aspects of the Foswiki projects' community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.

Private logging

Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of the Foswiki projects to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.

These logs are used to produce the site statistics pages; the raw log data is not made public, and is normally discarded after about two weeks.

Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view:

| 13 Oct 2008 - 23:24 | guest | view | Main.WebHome |  Mozilla | 127.0.0.1 |

And for one page edit:

| 13 Oct 2008 - 23:25 | RafaelAlvarez | edit | Main.WebHome |  | 127.0.0.1 |

Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site. IP addresses of users, derived from those logs are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the wiki, including the suspected use of malicious "sockpuppets" (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of the wiki.

Policy on release of data derived from page logs

It is the policy of Foswiki that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database, may be released by the system administrators or trusted users with access, in the following situations:

1. In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
2. With permission of the affected user
3. To the chair of Foswiki Association, his/her legal counsel, or his/her designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
4. Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
5. Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
6. Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of the Foswiki Association, its users or the public.

Foswiki policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.

Sharing information with third parties

Except where otherwise specified, all text added to Foswiki projects is available for reuse under the terms of the GFDL, except for (content that is from TWiki(tm) may have other licensing considerations, where the text is available but under other restrictions. this issue needs to be resolved before the Policy is accepted)

Foswiki will not sell or share private information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information. When required by law to release such information, the Association will notify, when possible, those members of the community whose personally identifiable data has been sought through, or produced as a result of, civil or criminal legal process, except when such notification is forbidden by state or federal law in the United States of America (Germany?).

Security of information

The Foswiki Association makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information may be available to anyone with access to the servers. A partial list of those people can be found in the Infrastructure Task Team page

E-mail, mailing lists and IRC

E-mail

The e-mail address you provided in your registration will be hiden from public view, and will be shown in your FoswikiUsers only to those with Admin rights on the website. The email address may be used by the Foswiki Association to communicate with users on a wider scale.

Mailing lists

If you subscribe to one of the project mailing lists, your address will be exposed to any other subscriber. The list archives of most of Foswiki's mailing lists are public, and your address may find itself quoted in messages. The list archives are also archived by other services. Mails are usually not deleted or modified, but it may be done in extreme cases.

Information email addresses

Some email addresses (see below) may forward mail to a team of volunteers trusted by the Association to use a ticket system such as OTRS to view them and answer them. Mail sent to the system is not publicly visible, but is visible to this group of Foswiki volunteers. By sending a mail to one of these addresses, your address may become public within this group. The ticket system team may discuss the contents of your mail with other contributors in order to best answer your query.

Addresses that direct to the ticket system system include:

• Mailing list names here
• Mailing list names here
• Mailing list names here

IRC

IRC channels are not officially part of Foswiki proper. By participating in an IRC channel, your IP address may be exposed to other participants. Different channels have different policies on whether logs may be published.

User data

Data on users, such as the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available via "user contributions" lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.

Removal of user accounts

Once created, user accounts will not be removed and user names cannot be changed. The Foswiki Association does not guarantee that a name will be changed on request.

Whether specific user information is deleted is dependant on the deletion policies of the project that contains the information.

Deletion of content

Removing text from Foswiki projects does not permanently delete it. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any user with "administrator" access on the wiki, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers or with admin rights to the website, but there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.

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