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Re: [Ekiga-list] Privacy policy of Ekiga

Stefan Monnier wrote:

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

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D Webb wrote:
I assume that everything I read, write, upload or download on the Internet 
and dates, times and IP addresses are being recorded by several
governmental agencies at any given moment. Thus far, I have rarely been
proven wrong. I assume everything I do on the Internet could just as well
have been shouted at the top of my lungs in a football stadium.
It is in this sense that I think privacy statements, while being a profitable marketing gesture for a business, offers no more privacy than no statement at all. Let us say you are going to tell someone over Ekiga about some terrible crime you will commit. Do you really think you will escape police intervention 
or a prison sentence because of a privacy statement? I guess you could
try and file a lawsuit from a prison cell, but would it not be easier to accept 
my interpretation of VoIP as shouting in a football stadium?
Finally, a lawyer could butt in and tell us all these complicated issues and scenarios and pitfalls, and the infinite variances in different countries. Again, would it not be easier to just assume you are shouting in a football stadium 
and just accept the Internet does not have much mercy for privacy?

Dominic
Of course the governments and police can get at a given time (as exception) access to data stored on the internet. But, at least in the Netherlands, also the government and the police have to respect laws and rules. So the comparison with information that is shouted in a stadium is not right here. It's also not a good attitude of the citizens of a country to just accept that everyone can violate your privacy. Citizens should put effort in making good rules for privacy or to protect it. Privacy is a human right of a democracy.
And there is more then police and government. The police and government are not the first and also not the second reason to have a privacy policy. The first reason is that you as a user, have the right to know what is happening with your given or received data. On the basis of the policy you can decide whether or not you are going to use that service. So Ekiga as a service can at least give information how they handle the information with or without given guarantees. Second it is also good to know if a service will doing at least there best to take care about privacy.
The fact that other service store information for a long time, set cookies, or even give or sell information to third parties (advertisement companies for example) makes a privacy policy useful or necessary for a service as Ekiga. I don't want a service that is gathering information and give it to third parties and so I like to know of Ekiga what there policy is in this case. And I think it is something that a service like Ekiga should have, because it is important how a service is dealing with your (private) information (I don't like to find my chatsession with my girlfriend to find on Google or that others can know who I'm calling at which times).
The argument that privacy statements or policies is only profitable marketing is something which is not true. I can't see why it should Ekiga costs money to have just written down there privacy policy. I think too that a privacy policy is not the same as a guarantee, it would be nice if it was, but inform your users about the privacy policy of the service and doing the best to protect the privacy of the 'users' is in itself a good thing. 


Dirk
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