Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Identity protection for functionaries

Identity protection for functionaries

  • Problem: Functionaries get doxxed on and off Wikimedia projects, and receive threats of harm and have had things happen to them in real life. Many countries, including the United States, do not have proper legal protections regarding publication of private information, and county and state records including birth certificate and property deed information wind up on data sharing sites.
  • Proposed solution: For functionaries, provide an identity protection service like DeleteMe and/or general identity theft protection (plenty of companies do this in the US). Provide equivalent services in other countries. Also write up a guide as to basic identity protection practices (there are plenty out there for high-risk journalists, for example).
  • Who would benefit: Functionaries, and users served by those functionaries.
  • More comments: It might be possible to convince companies to provide this service as a gesture of goodwill and charity.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Rschen7754 02:07, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting

What we could do to improve the situation is probably to find what prevents people from contributing to projects like Wikipedia in these situations and fix it. For instance before writing this reply, I wasn't aware of the policies, and I assumed that it was not possible to create additional accounts to avoid political persecution. Though I do edit Wikipedia through Tor and for that I had to request an exemption. Though sometimes even if I'm logged, I've to use a new route to edit as I'm somehow blocked even with the exemption, but after very few retries it usually works. Without the exemption I don't think I could do any editions at all from Tor. Another area of work would be to have guides to help persecuted people contribute to projects like Wikipedia and still stay safe. Using the tor-browser (with or without bridges depending on the country and the political situation), avoiding being identified through Stylometry, etc could probably help too. The issue here would be to find people persecuted people that are willing to explain why they don't contribute. The Tor and the Tails projects already interviewed people anonymously to understand better the needs of their users, so they also have experience with that. In addition they have to distribute bridges in countries where you could get in trouble for that, so some people involved probably have some experience with helping people facing persecution in ways that don't backfire. GNUtoo (talk) 21:25, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]