Policy:Privacy policy: Difference between revisions

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 {{PrivacyLang}}
-:''This version of the [[meta:Privacy policy|Privacy policy]] was recently approved by the [[Board of Trustees]]. Discussion and proposed changes are welcome on the [[meta:talk:Privacy policy|talk page at Meta]].''
+:''This version of the [[meta:Privacy policy|Privacy policy]] was approved in June 2006 by the [[Board of Trustees]]. Discussion and proposed changes are welcome on the [[meta:talk:Privacy policy|talk page at Meta]].''
 :''It is requested that this noticed be translated and linked from the [[MediaWiki:Copyright|footer]] of every page.''
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 If you have not logged in, you will be identified by your network IP address. This is a series of four numbers which identifies the Internet address from which you are contacting the wiki. Depending on your connection, this number may be traceable only to a large Internet service provider, or specifically to your school, place of business, or home. It may be possible that the origin of this IP address could be used in conjunction with any interests you express implicitly or explicitly by editing articles to identify you even by private individuals.
-It may be either difficult or easy for a motivated individual to connect your network IP address with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym. When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public, but it will be stored on the wiki servers for a relatively short amount of time. Thus it will be available to developers and may be released under certain circumstances (see below).
+It may be either difficult or easy for a motivated individual to connect your network IP address with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym.
+When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public except in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a wiki page by you or by another user with the same IP address. In all cases, your IP address will be stored on the wiki servers and can be seen by Wikimedia's server administrators and by users who have been granted "[[meta:CheckUser|CheckUser]]" access. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances (see below).
 If you use a company mail server from home or telecommute and use a DSL or cable Internet connection, it is likely to be very easy for your employer to identify your IP address and find all of your IP based Wikimedia project contributions. Using a user name is a better way of preserving your privacy in this situation. However, remember to log out or disconnect yourself after each session using a pseudonym on a shared computer, to avoid allowing others to use your identity.
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  "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5"
-Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems, in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site, or very rarely to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the wiki.
+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 either from those logs or from records in the database 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 Wikimedia that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs will not be released by the developers who have access to it, except as follows:
+It is the policy of Wikimedia that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:
 # In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
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 ==Security of information==
-The Wikimedia Foundation makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information will be available to all [[m:developers|developers]] with access to the servers.
+The Wikimedia Foundation 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 [[m:developers|developers]] list.
 == E-mail, mailing lists and IRC==
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 === Mailing lists===
-If you subscribe to one of the project [http://mail.wikimedia.org/ mailing lists], your address will be exposed to any other subscriber. The list archives of most of Wikimedia's mailing lists are public, and your address may find itself quoted in messages. The list archives are also archived by Gmane services. Mails are usually not deleted or modified, but it may be done in extreme cases.
+If you subscribe to one of the project [http://mail.wikimedia.org/ mailing lists], your address will be exposed to any other subscriber. The list archives of most of Wikimedia's mailing lists are public, and your address may find itself quoted in messages. The list archives are also archived by Gmane and 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 community to use a ticket system (OTRS) to view them and answer them.  Mail sent to the system is not publicly visible, but is visible to this group of Wikimedia editors. By sending a mail to one of these addresses, your address may become public within this group.  The OTRS team may discuss the contents of your mail with other contributors in order to best answer your query.
+Some email addresses (see below) may forward mail to a team of volunteers trusted by the Foundation 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 Wikimedia 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 OTRS system include:
+Addresses that direct to the ticket system system include:
 *info-de AT wikipedia DOT org
 *info-en AT wikipedia DOT org
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 === IRC ===
-[[m:IRC channels|IRC channels]] are not officially part of Wikimedia proper. By participating in an IRC channel, your IP address will be exposed to other participants. Different channels have different policies on whether logs may be published.
+[[m:IRC channels|IRC channels]] are not officially part of Wikimedia 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 occasionally in aggregated forms published by other users.
+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. It may be possible for a developer to change the username on an account, but you will need to request this yourself. The Wikimedia Foundation does not guarantee that a name will be changed on request. See [[meta:Right to vanish]] for further details.
+Once created, user accounts will not be removed. It may be possible for a username to be changed (depending on the policies of your local wiki and on the number of edits you have). The Wikimedia Foundation 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.
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 ==Deletion of content==
-Removing text from Wikimedia 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 sysop/administrator, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Only a developer can permanently delete information from the Wikimedia projects and there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.
+Removing text from Wikimedia 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, but there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.