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

Bugs item #2517320, was opened at 2009-01-18 14:45
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by garvinhicking
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Category: Plugins
Group: None
>Status: Closed
>Resolution: Fixed
>Priority: 1
Private: No
Submitted By: ToJe (toje)
>Assigned to: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
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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>Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2009-01-19 12:01

Message:
Thank you for this suggestion, I very much like the idea. I have
implemented the choice of an anonymized variant into the plugin for our
current snapshots, and it will be contained in the 1.5 release.

Best regars,
Garvin

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