User:Bootmii/Conservapedia:Privacy Policy

As any well-mannered site has, Conservapedia has its own privacy policy. As of the March 18, 2007, Conservapedia's privacy policy reads: "Conservapedia does not sell or share any information about users, except as necessary to report obscenity or vandalism to authorities. Your provision of information is purely for your own convenience in allowing other editors here to contact you." As you can see, Conservapedia's privacy policy is composed of a whopping 38 words. To give you a comparison of what a more professional website's privacy policy looks like, take a look at the privacy policy of Wikipedia, which is a site that, according to Ed Poor, is in competition with Conservapedia. Wikipedia's privacy policy is 2,694 words long, and that's just counting the actual prose itself, minus the header, links, etc. It's just over 70 times larger. Heck, even RationalWiki's privacy policy is longer than Conservapedia's.

History
Andy, Conservapedia's Führer, created the privacy policy on March 9, 2007. The only notable change it has gotten after that occurred nine days later, in which Andy added the words "except as necessary to report obscenity or vandalism to authorities" in regards to sharing users' private information. Other than that, the only changes that have been made to it were some formatting adjustments and vandalism, until some brilliant guy had the brilliant idea that they should probably lock the privacy policy from being edited by the common user.

Application
Regardless of the fact the Conservapedia's privacy policy is all of two sentences long, Conservapedia and its users still fail miserably at following it. Most often, Conservapedia's privacy policy is violated when one of the editors with the "checkuser" right abuses it by openly revealing a user's private information, most often it being a user's location and/or IP address. Just like Conservapedia, Wikipedia also reveals a user's IP address (and thus, location) when it comes to detecting sock puppets and abuse on a case-by-case basis, but unlike Conservapedia, Wikipedia mentions and asserts this in their privacy policy. Conservapedia, on the other hand, strictly states that they won't ever reveal a user's private information except to authorities. This, however, is not what happens in reality, as is seen in the examples below. Not only does Conservapedia reveal users' information when detecting sockpuppets and abuse, like Wikipedia does, but they go to the extra length to reveal users' private information in casual conversation, too.

Examples of privacy policy violations
More will be listed...eventually.
 * Conservative reveals the state that a user live in while blocking them.
 * Jpatt reveals the country that a user lives in while blocking them.
 * TK reveals the country that a user lives in while blocking them.