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GDPR Exports and Federated Authentication

Although the Article 29 Working Party seem to have had applications such as incident response in mind when drafting their guidance on exports, that guidance could also be helpful in the field of federated authentication. This technology allows an “identity provider” such as a university or college to assure a “service provider” such as a […]

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GDPR: sending incident reports overseas

When incident response teams (CSIRTs) detect an attack on their systems, they normally report details back to the network or organisation from which the attack comes. This can have two benefits for the reporter: in the short term, making the attack stop; in the longer term helping that organisation to improve the security of its […]

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Articles Tools

Data Breaches: Be Prepared

The Article 29 Working Party’s guidance on Breach Notification suggests some things we should do before a security breach occurs. The GDPR expects data controllers, within 72 hours of becoming aware of any security breach, to determine whether there is a risk to individuals and, if so, to report to the national Data Protection Authority. […]

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Automated Processing for Network and Information Security

Article 22 of the GDPR contains a new, and oddly-worded, “right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing”. This only applies to decisions that “produce[] legal effects … or similarly significantly affect[]” the individual. Last year, the Article 29 Working Party’s draft guidance on interpreting this Article noted that an […]

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Sensitive/Special Category Data and Learning Analytics

In thinking about the legal arrangements for Jisc’s learning analytics services we consciously postponed incorporating medical and other information that Article 9(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) classifies as Special Category Data (SCD): “personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing […]

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AI in Education: is it different?

Reflecting on the scope chosen by Blackboard for our working group – “Ethical use of AI in Education” – it’s worth considering what, if anything, makes education different as a venue for artificial intelligence. Education is, I think, different from commercial businesses because our measure of success should be what pupils/students achieve. Educational institutions should […]

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Ethical use of AI in HE

Last week I was invited to a fascinating discussion on ethical use of artificial intelligence in higher education, hosted by Blackboard. Obviously that’s a huge topic, so I’ve been trying to come up with a way to divide it into smaller ones without too many overlaps. So far, it seems a division into three may […]

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Explaining AI algorithms

One of the concerns commonly raised for Artificial Intelligence is that it may not be clear how a system reached its conclusion from the input data. The same could well be said of human decision makers: AI at least lets us choose an approach based on the kind of explainability we want. Discussions at last […]

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Presentations

How to Start Learning Analytics?

One of my guidelines for when consent may be an appropriate basis for processing personal data is whether the individual is able to lie or walk away. If they can, then that practical possibility may indicate a legal possibility too. When we’re using learning analytics, as a production service, to identify when students could benefit […]

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Article 29 WP draft on Transparency

The Article 29 Working Party has published its draft guidelines on transparency. For those of us who have already been working on GDPR privacy notices, there don’t seem to be any surprises: this is largely a compilation of the relevant sections of the Regulation and other guidance. In particular, it seems to have been strongly […]