Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: The OSI Does Not Respect Anybody's Privacy
The surveillance mafia that bans dissent or key people (even co-founders) with dissenting views
As noted in the previous part, in April and perhaps in May too we shall examine a plethora of problems at the OSI, not limited to 1) lobbying; 2) privacy violations; 3) election woes or lack of transparency therein. Some people come to us with information and we do our best to organise it for effective absorption by readers.
Privacy policy information or critique was sent to us some days ago. OSI is apparently caring about privacy like it cares for Free software, i.e. not so much or merely talking about it but doing the opposite. Those looking above the surface would not even notice the issue, which is below the surface but feasible to verify. Just look for "woocommerce-analytics" in page source and also this:
The OSI did the same to opensource.net, which it also controls.
They run their sites like it's online commerce.
People with more knowledge than us have more to say. "So I don’t know if this is something that you’re interested in," one source told us, "but remember how I was analyzing privacy policies… Well, I tend to still do it, but I haven’t done a write-up on one in a bit."
Then came the OSI, which was scrutinised more closely.
"I looked at the OSI privacy policy," the source said, "and there are some questionable tactics there [regarding surveillance] like why do you need my referring website information?"
"And who do you share that information with and what’s the retention period of that," the source added, "it’s not in the privacy policy as well as [and perhaps more importantly] there’s no opt-out."
"The collector information from you during membership," the source said, may be "OK, but they also collect [private information from] anyone that goes to the website and they keep track of the referring page."
If the OSI was not run by Microsofters, it would know why that's bad.
"I say it would be fun to go to some funny pages first," the source said, "and then just go to the OSI website so the referring page is always something really 🤪" (crazy).
"Like really mess with marketing," the source joked, "and one day I have all of the referrers come from home improvement stores and the next day have just a bunch of the referrers come from bicycle shops, and do it [in a way which is] coordinated so it’s not the same IP address as because oh yes, they collect that too!"
It should be noted that the Linux Foundation did similar things to its sites, including Linux.com. But then again, consider who runs things there [1, 2]. Same people. █