Dear Matt,
I’ve been a long-time user of WordPress, clocking up well over a decade both publishing on and building plugins for it. I love it – and I even tried to get a job at Automattic (but that’s a story for another time).
Recently I’ve been really impressed with the work done around privacy, mostly prompted by GDPR. Well done for ensuring the considerable effort this required was made, and that privacy now has a much more prominent place in WordPress.
However, the trolling of privacy standards which I saw (online) at WPEU this week threatens to undermine a nascent and fragile respect of data privacy. I understand there are cultural differences between the EU and the US regarding personal data, but the WordPress community should – has to – be better than this, in the same way that we should be, and are being, better than to engage in other damaging activities (GamerGate culture, for example).
A possible immediate fall-out of these unhelpful comments was that, while 80 people were registered for Heather’s Developing for Privacy and Data Protection workshop, fewer than 35 showed up. We need *more* designers and developers to care about data protection, so anything that puts them off learning has the potential to be massively damaging to the privacy of thousands, possibly millions, of users their work will touch.
Heather has done amazing work in the UK and beyond for years, banging the drum that as a web industry we must professionalise to be taken seriously by users, legislators, and other industries. She was instrumental in the setting up of an industry body for the web in the UK. A commitment to privacy and data protection is a huge part of professionalising the web industry, in the same way that a commitment to safety is a huge part of a civil engineer’s attitude to their profession. It would be a huge shame to see WordPress further the “we got all your data, lolz suckas!” attitude shown by other big online players (looking at you, Facebook).
Please can you consider whether trolling comments like that help or hinder important work, while you continue to do a great job leading Automattic.
Kind regards, and thanks for all you’ve done for the web community.
Chris Taylor