For a long time, we have requested Date of Birth and Location when creating a new account.
We did this exclusively as an additional anti-spam measure: the more you frustrate an automatic spam account creating process (as used by many spam organizations) by requesting 'unexpected mandatory data' to be filled in, the fewer the administrators have to clean up unwanted new accounts.
We had also set all member profiles as only visible to other members by default.
Note: we have never set member profiles to being visible to any non-member at any time; for that reason, they could also not be indexed by search engines. Members who set their profiles to 'visible to anyone' will have done so for their own reasons. We advise against it.
Today, we were challenged on the GDPR status of the combination of collecting Date of Birth and Location, and publishing these data (if only to other members) by default.
True: we do not explicitly state in our privacy policy (https://forums.freebsd.org/help/privacy-policy/) that we do this, only that profile data you fill in yourself are collected and stored by us. We believe the privacy policy covers this implicitly, but we're not interested in lengthy legal debates when it's easier to just rectify the issue or to tell you how to do it yourself.
Starting today, we have removed the need for supplying a Date of Birth or a Location (note: any nonsensical data was totally acceptable to us, we were not interested in the actual data, as most of you have clearly understood).
We have also set member profiles to 'visible to nobody' by default.
Since it is not possible for us to change these data retroactively, we hereby inform you that you can edit your own profile data at any time.
You can remove data that you do not want to share (e.g. your birthday and location can be made empty there) and/or you can set your profile to not be visible to anyone at all.
You can edit your account here: https://forums.freebsd.org/account/
We did this exclusively as an additional anti-spam measure: the more you frustrate an automatic spam account creating process (as used by many spam organizations) by requesting 'unexpected mandatory data' to be filled in, the fewer the administrators have to clean up unwanted new accounts.
We had also set all member profiles as only visible to other members by default.
Note: we have never set member profiles to being visible to any non-member at any time; for that reason, they could also not be indexed by search engines. Members who set their profiles to 'visible to anyone' will have done so for their own reasons. We advise against it.
Today, we were challenged on the GDPR status of the combination of collecting Date of Birth and Location, and publishing these data (if only to other members) by default.
True: we do not explicitly state in our privacy policy (https://forums.freebsd.org/help/privacy-policy/) that we do this, only that profile data you fill in yourself are collected and stored by us. We believe the privacy policy covers this implicitly, but we're not interested in lengthy legal debates when it's easier to just rectify the issue or to tell you how to do it yourself.
Starting today, we have removed the need for supplying a Date of Birth or a Location (note: any nonsensical data was totally acceptable to us, we were not interested in the actual data, as most of you have clearly understood).
We have also set member profiles to 'visible to nobody' by default.
Since it is not possible for us to change these data retroactively, we hereby inform you that you can edit your own profile data at any time.
You can remove data that you do not want to share (e.g. your birthday and location can be made empty there) and/or you can set your profile to not be visible to anyone at all.
You can edit your account here: https://forums.freebsd.org/account/