During my tests of the Logout/Login behavior I found that all forum statistics are available to the public (no login necessary).
Does this behavior conform to (German) privacy laws?
I guess you must be more specific. When the statistics say things like N users logged in this week against M users last week, I think this is innocent. But when it call names …
@susejunky doesn’t matter for these forums, they are governed by US law. See the FAQ’s and Terms of Service https://en.opensuse.org/Terms_of_site#Governing_law_and_forum
Was all this verified by the SUSE lawyers?
Are the servers not located in Germany?
@susejunky If you wish to go down this route I suggest you contact your lawyers to contact the SUSE Lawyers.
Well, you can see how many posts a user produced (per time span) or how many “Likes” she/he received or awarded.
And it is up to the user to give a (real) name (which by the way can never be changed by the user later on).
@susejunky that can be changed (Username etc) by creating a ticket on Progress via sending an email to admin{at}opensuse{dot}org since we have no control over the login system.
To straighten that out: I have no intention “to cause trouble” !
I just want to point out to the people who manage this forum (i.e. define the access rights for certain information kept in/produced by the forum) that it might be worth to verify that the current setup does not violate any privacy laws.
@susejunky Please see the Forum FAQ’s on Forum content.
The statistics are not information provided by the forum members but by the forum (software) itself and give information on how individual forum members “perform”.
However I’m not the one who will be beaten so I don’t really care. I just wanted to point out what in my opinion might become a legal risk to the ones who operate this forum.
As Malcolm already mentioned, you’re free to investigate the legal route for yourself. Other than that I’m certain that better legal minds than ours already have this covered. No real names or physical addresses are required to participate here.
1 Like
I know my English is lousy.
Please forgive me and allow me to try one last time to explain what this post of mine is about:
To me it makes not difference whether those statistics are available to the public or not. I do not care about them, I don’t need them and I do not even understand why a forum like this here bothers to keep such statistics.
I’m no lawyer. I spent the last twenty years as IT consultant in various projects and saw many of them fighting legal issues (liability, copyright, protection of private data, …) and the lesson I learned was: If you think you detected a legal risk voice it. It is cheaper to check with the legal department than to fight a law suit.
There is no need for me to do so! Neither me (nor any other “plain” forum member) will be the potential target of those law firms which make their living by issuing “Abmahnungen” (or whatever the English equivalent to this might be). The ones in charge of this forum will be targeted.
I lived up to my lesson (described above) and voiced my concerns. That’s all. If it is not welcome, then just delete this thread. I do not care.
If that is the case then it is fine, nobody is at risk and we can forget about this thread.
But if that data is there it will not be removed or disguised and every login reveals an IP-address. Companies like Cambridge Analytica might be able to do a lot of funny things with all that data …
But that is a different story.
I agree.
First I do not see any use for statistics about things happening in the forums, when at all, then just for the staff and maybe the members.
The answer to that will obviously be again: that is how Discourse is and you have to swallow it.
And I appreciate the warning given by susejunky.