loopholes and privacy

General
1

I value privacy highly. I believe that hive13 should be a community that respects privacy more than any other, especially electronic privacy.

It is up to us to establish a precedent for the rights and responsibilities of members, including leaders.

Therefore, I propose that we establish a code of ethics which includes a right to privacy. This should probably not be in by-laws. Rather, we should have a malleable and transparent handbook which contains the rights and responsibilities of members.

This should be written by the membership as a whole, express the ethos of the majority, and allow all to be included and accepted. It should also provide protections which guard the freedoms we enjoy and wish to preserve as hackers.

I ask for thoughtful and constructive replies here so that we may establish a record, a conversation, perhaps a document which affirms our noble intentions and our faith in each other as fellow members and friends.

2

  1. We should probably collect a lot less PII in the first place.

  2. I don’t find it invasive that a member would want to know who other members are by name. It does seem kind of weird to me that a member would want their membership to be a secret kept from other members. Maybe I’m missing the rationale.

3

I think what you really want is a privacy policy, which I believe is a legal document, and probably should be written by, or in consultation with a lawyer. I think such a document detailing the information we collect, and our intentions with said information would be a great thing for a maker space to have and make available to any new or current members. Hackers in particular are very privacy conscious, and would be more motivated than most individuals to see that the organizations they belong to have such a document.

As for general principals I think the following would be a good start:

  1. We will collect personal information only for the purposes of collecting membership dues, or other operations integral to the space. Operations include but are not limited to contact information for wardens, email addresses used to access the mailing list or other electronic communications
  2. We will not sell, give out, or otherwise distribute personal information on members unless legally compelled to do so by a court of law. Personally information under this restriction should include, but not be limited to: Phone Numbers, Email Addresses, Physical Addresses, Financial Information (such as bank account information used to pay membership fees).