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Clarify whether CUs should share non-public information with external services
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Description

As a follow up to T293379, the current tickets keeps track of an inquiry about
potential policy and/or legal issues with CheckUsers performing investigations with private Wikimedia data using completely external services. More specifically, the following question was asked: "does [a CheckUser] violate the privacy policy [when sharing user User Agent information with a third-party, as part of an anti-abuse investigation?"

For context, the user agent and IP information that CheckUsers insert in those external tools are not directly tied to any username. Some illustrations are this IP copy-paste or UA information parsing.

The question, as well as the broader issue of sharing non-public information with external services will be raised with WMF-Legal, and this ticket updated accordingly.

Event Timeline

Hey @GeneralNotability and @Urbanecm. As mentioned earlier, your question will be brought to WMF-Legal's attention. Feel free to rename it or adjust the description if I missed some aspects.

Thank you @sguebo_WMF. The specific question from the ticket was about UAs, but I ask that Legal also account for IPs, since those are covered under the same privacy policy and there is a much greater need to query external data on those. And as a caveat, none of these checks would link a username to the IPs - we're doing things like checking whois (https://whois-referral.toolforge.org/gateway.py?lookup=true&ip=8.8.8.8) or parsing a useragent (https://www.whatsmyua.info/api/v1/ua?ua=Mozilla/5.0%20(Windows%20NT%2010.0;%20Win64;%20x64;%20rv:93.0)%20Gecko/20100101%20Firefox/93.0), but nothing in these checks ties the private data to a specific user or users.

Noted, thanks for the additional context @GeneralNotability. The description was updated accordingly.