WordPress / WordPress/WordPress-Coding-Standards

Privacy sniffs

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#1,830 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Status: Needs investigation Type: Enhancement
Dominant language
PHP
Stars
2.8k
Forks
521
Avg merge
5d 20h
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Currently it is hard for users to find out what plugins and themes are doing with regards to data before installing. There is currently an optional ‘privacy’ section in the readme that gets put in the ‘Privacy policy postbox’. Part of this is currently described in 'Suggesting text for the site privacy policy'.

Describe the solution you’d like

We’d like to check for functions that interact with third parties or load content from external domains. Examples of this would be wp_enqueue_script() with an external domain, or wp_remote_post() which might contain user data. If we detect usage of these functions, we should check if wp_add_privacy_policy_content() is being called, or maybe if the readme contains a privacy policy section.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the proposed checks for wp_enqueue_script(), wp_remote_post(), and wp_add_privacy_policy_content(), along with the readme privacy policy section described in the issue. Define which external interactions require a privacy declaration and how the sniff should validate that requirement.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
php
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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