WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

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The End
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WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by The End » Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:44 pm

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/ ... =cc9a4b521

Shouldn't they have had this position years ago?

On another note, I notice most of the jobs being offered have a "remote" option. I wonder if they are having trouble getting people to come to San Francisco?

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia?t=cc9a4b521
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AndrewForson
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Re: WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by AndrewForson » Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:50 pm

Presumably they want to spread a small proporition of the goodies from the trough to people in other countries who cannot easily get work permits in the US.

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Re: WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:13 pm

Seen against the backdrop of repeated security breaches, confusion over cookies, the GDPR, and the Facebook scandal, it does seem rather late.

The answer will of course be in determining the first time the WMF had ever said this.....
Privacy is one of the core values of the Wikimedia Foundation
I'm guessing it was not very long ago.

Maybe they're trying to fool people into thinking their long standing belief that editors have an almost total right to anonymity, has somehow all along been out of a concern for their privacy.

If the WMF were really concerned about privacy, they wouldn't simply recommend people register an account, it would be mandatory. As it stands, IP users are only informed of the privacy benefits below helpful information like the fact you can choose your own name (cool!) and you can change how Wikipedia looks (cool!).

And almost everything they do in the field of CheckUser would be different. Can anyone here even tell me how I am supposed to file an anonymous complaint about the conduct of a CheckUser? I'm not aware of a single way to do that which doesn't require me to reveal some kind of personally identifying information, and to the very scumbags I am complaining about.

In short, they don't give a deal about privacy. They are trying to avoid a privacy related scandal which would cut the flow of donations. These are very different thighs entirely.

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AndrewForson
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Re: WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by AndrewForson » Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:31 pm

CrowsNest wrote:The answer will of course be in determining the first time the WMF had ever said this.....
Privacy is one of the core values of the Wikimedia Foundation
I'm guessing it was not very long ago.

The answer, of course, is "never". Looking Meta we read
There have been a few iterations of values, this page tries to give a quick summary of their history.

The values of the Wikimedia Foundation were first laid down by Anthere in 2008. They eventually settled on this version.
In 2013, the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation issued the Wikimedia Foundation Guiding Principles describing how the Wikimedia Foundation's Mission and Vision are implemented in its work. This took a few of the concepts used in the values and integrated them in another document.
In 2016, a discussion took place to update the Wikimedia Foundation's values and yielded the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation staff interaction values.

The 2008 version does not mention "privacy".

The 2013 document mentions it just once, in the following context:
The Wikimedia Foundation values transparency. [...] Most information is available to the public, except where publishing it would infringe on the privacy of other organizations or of individuals.

The 2017 document again does not mention the word.

We conclude that privacy has never been one of the Foundation's core values, and that the statement in this job advert is untrue. Are you surprised?

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Re: WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Jul 01, 2018 7:56 pm

AndrewForson wrote:We conclude that privacy has never been one of the Foundation's core values, and that the statement in this job advert is untrue. Are you surprised?

I'm not. They have made one thing quite clear without saying it explicitly: This thing called "privacy" is for Wikipedia insiders only. You are an outsider and thus entitled to nothing.

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Re: WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by Strelnikov » Tue Jul 03, 2018 10:50 pm

The End wrote:
.....On another note, I notice most of the jobs being offered have a "remote" option. I wonder if they are having trouble getting people to come to San Francisco?

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia?t=cc9a4b521


Nobody can afford San Fran any more, the average rent in 2015 was $3,460/month according to Business Insider. Also, they want to get people from cheaper parts of the world, so they can keep the salary low. They'll pick somebody in a "flyover" state or Pakistan and if the latter, that person will be taxed to fix the white-knuckle Karakoram Highway, where drivers in buses and trucks blare their horns before driving through blind corners at high speed, and the valleys sport the occasional rusting truck that skidded off the road in the winter or lost the game of blind chicken sometime in the rest of the year.

پاکستان زِنده باد
Pakistan Zindabad!
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by Graaf Statler » Wed Jul 04, 2018 11:27 am

Strelnikov wrote:
The End wrote:
.....On another note, I notice most of the jobs being offered have a "remote" option. I wonder if they are having trouble getting people to come to San Francisco?

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia?t=cc9a4b521


Nobody can afford San Fran any more, the average rent in 2015 was $3,460/month according to Business Insider. Also, they want to get people from cheaper parts of the world, so they can keep the salary low. They'll pick somebody in a "flyover" state or Pakistan and if the latter, that person will be taxed to fix the white-knuckle Karakoram Highway, where drivers in buses and trucks blare their horns before driving through blind corners at high speed, and the valleys sport the occasional rusting truck that skidded off the road in the winter or lost the game of blind chicken sometime in the rest of the year.

پاکستان زِنده باد
Pakistan Zindabad!

Thanks Strelnikov! i really likes the video of the Karakoram Highway, it reminded me to the Greek way of driving. (Traffic signs? Never heard of. A white line on the road? That means this is the place to overtake a car, but better a truck. Yamas! Yamas, Cheers! It is only 20 kilometer driving to my home, so who cares.)
But I think there is a better reason to take someone form I-don't-know -where. Because nobody with any common sense and knowledge of the new privacy laws will accept that hopeless job!

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Re: WMF looking for a Privacy Engineer

Post by Strelnikov » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:38 pm

Graaf Statler wrote:
Strelnikov wrote:
The End wrote:
.....On another note, I notice most of the jobs being offered have a "remote" option. I wonder if they are having trouble getting people to come to San Francisco?

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia?t=cc9a4b521


Nobody can afford San Fran any more, the average rent in 2015 was $3,460/month according to Business Insider. Also, they want to get people from cheaper parts of the world, so they can keep the salary low. They'll pick somebody in a "flyover" state or Pakistan and if the latter, that person will be taxed to fix the white-knuckle Karakoram Highway, where drivers in buses and trucks blare their horns before driving through blind corners at high speed, and the valleys sport the occasional rusting truck that skidded off the road in the winter or lost the game of blind chicken sometime in the rest of the year.

پاکستان زِنده باد
Pakistan Zindabad!


Thanks Strelnikov! i really likes the video of the Karakoram Highway, it reminded me to the Greek way of driving. (Traffic signs? Never heard of. A white line on the road? That means this is the place to overtake a car, but better a truck. Yamas! Yamas, Cheers! It is only 20 kilometer driving to my home, so who cares.)
But I think there is a better reason to take someone form I-don't-know -where. Because nobody with any common sense and knowledge of the new privacy laws will accept that hopeless job!



That highway only exists because the Chinese Communist Party was willing to work with Mohammad Ayub Khan, the military dictator "president" of Pakistan in the 1960s to blast roadbed out of steep hillsides in zig-zag patterns and through valleys that wash out frequently. It runs from Kashgar in Chinese Xinjiang (the closest major city is Osh in ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan) all the way down to Hasan Abdal in northern Punjab. It's how Chinese goods make it into Pakistan in crappy three-wheeler trucks or knackered Hino trucks, where they then drive to the Afghan border and the stuff is sold to other truckers who take it into Afghanistan and the goods are paid for by the opium trade.....black tar heroin keeps the wheels moving in both countries. Of course the Taliban do a poppy tax in the areas they control, and you know some of that money has reached the Central Asian section of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the international Islamist party that wants to build their own Islamic State somewhere so a new Sunni caliph can exist (shutting down the Ottoman Empire wasn't as brilliant a strategy as the British and French empires thought it was.)

Because nobody with any common sense and knowledge of the new privacy laws will accept that hopeless job!


People will take any awful, hopeless job just to add it to their resumes to impress future employers. Some people will take a doomed job just for the extra money - an example I could name from memory were all the policemen who came to South Vietnam during the American-Vietnamese war to work as Public Safety advisors with the South Vietnamese police - many of them figured out that there was no changing how that police force worked, so they just rode out their contracts, picked up girlfriends, and did things on the side. As for Wikipedia, how much loyalty has been shown by people who work at the WMF? Not a lot I would say.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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