Privacy Office Hour Notes – January 9th, 2019

Huge thank you to all who attended the very productive office hours! The recap notes are a bit delayed, but they were not forgotten! A full agenda can also be found in an earlier post, and the full transcript can be found in Slack.

Here are the highlights of the meeting:

Agenda Item 1 – Roadmap Review

• @idea15 reminded us that there is a more recent version of the Roadmap.
  • @desrosj will investigate how to give more maintainers access to update the roadmap page.
• @lakenh mentioned TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. issue #44161, regarding IP addresses stored within the usermeta table.
  • @xkon provided an example of a user metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. session token, and it contained both a user agent and IP address.
  • @lakenh also discovered that the community-events-location user meta field also contains a full IP address.
    • He also suggested perhaps anonymizing that particular IP by dropping the last few places as the geographical location shouldn’t change by much.
  • @desrosj then asked if these fields were accounted for within the original data export/erasure tools.
    • @garrett-eclipse delivers the bad news that they were not.
    • Ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. to track this issue has been opened, #45889.

Agenda Item 2 – 2019

• @idea15 gave an update on the cross-project privacy group which broke ground at Drupal Europe. Joomla’s Glip (similar to WordPress’ SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.) now has representatives from this WordPress Privacy team, Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, Umbraco, as well as other industry representatives who are all providing aid to make all CMSs have great privacy features built-in.
• @desrosj helped to set expectations for what privacy-related changes are acceptable moving forward based on a recent discussion in #core-committers. Small enhancements and bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. fixes will generally be OK to include in new releases with little oversight. Larger enhancements will need approval by version release leads.
• Brainstorm session for how the team’s goals and the greater WordPress project’s goals overlap in 2019.
  • @desrosj suggested the following three areas of being places that we can help out:
    • Providing a way for users to opt-in to automatic pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party and theme updates.
    • Providing a way for users to opt-in to automatic updates of major CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. releases.
    • Building a WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ directory for discovering blocks, and a way to seamlessly install them.
  • @desrosj also suggested Health Check as a possible area, as perhaps there are some server level privacy checks that could be built in.
    • @clorith expressed that the team was open to any ideas and that privacy features for Health Check can be created as GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issues on its repo for consideration.

#core-privacy, #privacy