1. A method for harvesting collaboration data produced by a collaboration application corresponding to a collaborative activity, said method comprising: defining, by a user, a privacy policy for collaboration data prepared by said user, said privacy policy including a list of fields that identify the collaboration data to be harvested and a corresponding user-defined privilege indicating whether or not the collaboration data is to be harvested from said fields and a defined rule permitting harvesting with an applied transformation to said collaboration data prior to harvesting, said fields corresponding to metadata fields defined within the collaboration application; and prior to harvesting: implementing a program at a user device that interacts with said collaboration software via an interface to scan stored collaboration data generated by that user and stored at said user device; determining from said scan any fields present that match the fields in the list of fields in said user privacy policy; and checking, for the fields that match, whether the privileges associated with those fields in the list permit harvesting of the collaboration data stored in the matched fields; harvesting the user generated collaboration data associated with the matched fields whose privileges are specified as allowable under the privacy policy; and transforming the user generated collaboration data associated with the matched fields whose privileges are specified as allowable if said collaboration data can be transformed in accordance with said defined rule in the privacy policy; and storing the harvested collaboration data in a file, wherein prior to said defining, the method further comprises: alerting the user to the privacy policy and the defined rule in the privacy policy for the collaboration data; alerting the user to the matched fields associated with the collaboration data to be harvested and the privileges associated with the fields in the list under the privacy policy; allowing the user to modify the privileges or rule associated with the fields in the list; and allowing the user to opt out from participating in the harvesting of the collaboration data.