Upcoming changes due to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

As I wrote in my opening statement, the three main stats sits (did we miss any?) are already covered. Yet the individual users get to decide whether they want their data be part of those or not. By default we have to exclude their data but we probably won't do that for existing users and just announce that option's availability as part of our general announcements.

That said, you should be fine :-)

Neither can I speak for WCG/IBM nor am I fully aware of what happened there, but I can understand IBM's urge to try and comply with the GDPR the best they can as the violation penalties can be pretty threatening (for good reason IMHO). Just wanted to say that downstream data consumers like the stats sites can't be held accountable by the data provider (like IBM) itself. They have to answer to their local data protection authorities themselves. They'll only be notified of a data erasure request issued by the original data subject (project participant) and that's all.

That said, the three main stats sites haven't signed any formal agreement with us. We just have to have a way to know who's using our data since we are obliged to notify them about erasure requests, hence our requirement for registration of individual download accounts. The erasure requests will be part of the data exports themselves which should be compliant with GDPR as we interpret it right now.

Oliver

Not that I'm aware of. But it's one thing if someone scrapes our website, which could be considered abuse and can hardly be prevented, and another when we provide said data to third parties. We have to be in control of the data entrusted to us.

Oliver