Privacy, data protection, and open source development

Heather Burns
Being human

Open source content management systems are made by those who show up. This creates a unique challenge when developing for privacy and data protection, as contributors bring very different cultural and legal approaches to the table. As project contributors, we need to acknowledge those differences, and the issues they create, so that we can provide a better standard of privacy for those who use our CMSes and those who visit the sites made on them.

In this session, we will discuss different cultural approaches to privacy, summarise different legal approaches including GDPR, and will also reflect on the impact that open source CMS development can have on privacy across the web. We will take a brief look at recent data protection scandals which have brought these issues to the fore, including those involving open source CMSes. And for a case study, we’ll explore how the WordPress project has approached improving privacy standards in advance of GDPR.