page_title: Tableau Software
section_title: Wikileaks and policy changes
hierarchical_section_title: Tableau Software / Wikileaks and policy changes
caption_attribution_description: English: Created by Tableau Software
context_page_description: Tableau Software is an interactive data visualization software company founded in January 2003 by Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte, in Mountain View, California. The company is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States focused on business intelligence. On August 1, 2019, Salesforce acquired Tableau for $15.7 billion.
  Chabot, Hanrahan and Stolte were researchers at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University who specialized in visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing relational databases and data cubes. The company was started as a commercial outlet for research produced at Stanford between 1999-2002.
  Tableau products query relational databases, online analytical processing cubes, cloud databases, and spreadsheets to generate graph-type data visualizations. The products can also extract, store, and retrieve data from an in-memory data engine.
context_section_description: On December 2, 2010, Tableau deleted WikiLeaks's visualizations about the United States diplomatic cables leak, stating it was due to direct political pressure from US Senator Joe Lieberman.
  On February 21, 2011, Tableau posted an updated data policy. The accompanying blog post cited the two main changes as (1) creating a formal complaint process and (2) using freedom of speech as a guiding principle. In addition, the post announced the creation of an advisory board to help the company navigate future situations that "push the boundaries" of the policy. Tableau likened the new policy to the model set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and opined that under the new policy, Wikileaks' visuals would not have been removed, as "the underlying data were statistics about the cables, not the cables themselves".
caption: Visualization created by Tableau Software
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