[ php-blog-Bugs-2517320 ] Akismet handling may violate german data protection laws

Bugs item #2517320, was opened at 2009-01-18 15:45
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Category: Plugins
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: ToJe (toje)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Akismet handling may violate german data protection laws

Initial Comment:
According to <http://www.datenschutzbeauftragter-online.de/akismet-plugin-rechtswidrig/>, the current handling of data transmitted by using the Akismet functionality in the spamblock plugin might violate german data protection law (and possibly also the data protection laws of other EU countries). The main problem is the data transmitted in the "comment_author*" variables, a lesser problem the IP address of the author (user_ip), which is more a kind of "grey zone" (personally I don't regard an IP address as personal data in most cases, but YMMV).

An easy solution would be to make the transmission of this information configurable via the administration backend. I don't think that Akismet would barf on empty values in this fields, as most of them are optional anyway. The detection rate obviously would decline a bit, but this seems like the price that has to be paid.

Please consider adding this configuration option. 

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