** WORLD COMMUNITY GRID - EUROPEAN DATA PROCESSING AGREEMENT - UPDATE **
Due to the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules going into effect on May 25th, 2018, the BOINC dev team has decided it must implement
the ability to (
https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/2447):
- Allow the user to choose if the CPID, RAC, Username, and crunch statistics should be shared as Public or Not Public. BOINC has decided to place this radio button or
checkbox on the web account of each project (so the user may choose this switch value).
- Allow the user to choose to DELETE the entire account. From what I understand this button will be inside the web account, the user will click it, a confirmation e-mail will be sent,
the user will confirm via e-mail, and then after a certain amount of time, the project will purge all user data from BOINC for that particular project.
The daily statistic dump files will be filtered in a way where they will not include users who Hide the account data (IE they made it private). Deleted users will be missing completely.
Technically, if the above implementation goes as planned (I believe the devs are still testing the changes for most projects) and some projects have not upgraded (this means some admins of certain boinc projects have not pulled the repo upgrades),
these changes will not impact biblepay (IE- for Rosetta@Home), as long as Rosetta does not add additional business logic on top of the BOINC business logic for GDPR.
The reason WCG is affected, is IBM took this a step further and require each data consumer (IE our sanctuaries) to adhere to the WCG Data Processing Agreement.
This agreement will most likely contain a clause that (asks consumers of the DPA) promising to honor any deleted user flag (that we will not persistently show stats for the deleted user
after the deletion occurs), that we will not cache the data and show it after the user hides the data, and potentially will not share the data with other consumers, etc.
I communicated with WCG support, and applied for the Data Processing Agreement token. I received a response that the legal text in the DPA is not even complete yet.
I explained that this is a high priority, and asked if they could finish this within 7 days. So at this point we are waiting for the DPA itself.
** IMPACT ON WORLD COMMUNITY GRID RENUMERATION FROM BIBLEPAY **
Since I personally view it as unfair to continue to assess the WCG crunchers at the current static level (since we have new users being onboarded and we have
RAC changes), but otoh, I also view it as unfair to 'pull the plug' on every researcher who has built up RAC on WCG for biblepay, I have decided to implement a
temporary World Community Grid RAC decay process for 14 days. The idea behind this is to phase out world community grid Biblepay wide until the DPA is signed and tested.
To implement this I plan on reducing the WCG Credit factor by .10 per day until it reaches 0. On May 26th, the factor will be 1.4, May 30th: 1.0, June 9th: 0 (project removed).
In this way, current crunchers still receive some of the benefit of the WCG, until it is phased out.
If WCG finishes the DPA early and we are able to implement it, we can then reverse this. I did not receive a reply on the ETA of the DPA.