Re: [Ekiga-list] Privacy policy of Ekiga

[Stefan Monnier <monnier iro umontreal ca>]

>> >> I hope you will be able to point me to the privacy statements of
>> >> Ekiga or otherwise You will take this subject very seriously.
>> > Are you talking about ekiga or ekiga.net?
>> I think both are really important, is it not?

Not really: the Ekiga application is just that: an application.
It happens to use the network, just like Firefox, but it doesn't
(modulo bugs or nasty people adding backdoors) connect to any machine
to which you haven't explicitly asked it to connect.

I don't think a privacy statement is important here.

> You seem to assume that Ekiga is an organization, in the way that Skype 
> is an organization.  It is not at all the same thing: Skype is a 
> commercial organization with a proprietary product and service; Ekiga 
> is an open source application, and there is a community that supports 
> and uses it.  To use myself as an example, the only information that 
> ekiga.net has access to are my name and email address.  There need be 
> no privacy statement, since there is no collection of personal data, 
> such as Skype might require and use.

The fact that Ekiga.net is not commercial doesn't make much difference:
it does keep a database of users with their email address and names, and
(more importantly) it does keep track of which ones are connected and
from where, so it know about IP addresses and may potentially keep a log
of "when which user connected with which IP".

And the police may order Damien to give out some of that info, or some
dire financial need (or juicy offer) may push Damien to sell that info.

So a privacy statement explaining what info is kept (e.g. is a log of IP
addresses kept?), that to which it is intended (e.g. it's not intended
to be distributed to any third party, except the name database which is
freely searchable, IIUC), and the worst case guarantee (all the data may
be stolen, subpoena'd, sold, ...).


        Stefan