GDPR: New Website features and statistics export option
Submitted on 28 Nov 2018 17:11:05 UTC
We plan to upgrade the Einstein@Home Web site this coming week in order to deploy new features that make our project more GDPR compliant. To that end users will see some new options that I will summarize here.
- New users may only create an account by registering through the Web site. After your account is created, you may connect to Einstein@Home using a client. We recommend to always install the latest BOINC Manager to ensure compatibility with the current and upcoming changes.
- Existing users will be asked to consent to our privacy policy and forum guidelines upon their next website login.
There is a new privacy option: Do you consent to exporting your data to BOINC statistics aggregation Web sites? This is set to 'No' (disabled) by default. You may enable the feature in Account -> Preferences -> Privacy.
- Sites that aggregate project stats, such as BOINCstats, may not function for you if you do not enable this option.
These features are already in place on our test project: Albert@Home.
In order to make the transition easier, there will be a two week period after the Web site is updated but before the statistics export option goes into effect. This grace period will end on December 17th. Users should still go to the privacy preferences page, and enable statistics exports in preparation of the new policy.
PS - Some other BOINC projects may also require users to consent to statistics exports soon. This means you must enable a similar statistics export option on their respective Web sites.
Update: 2018-11-29 - The changes to the Web site have been rolled-out. The statistics export option will go in effect December 17th.
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Comments
Thanks Oliver, that's no
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Thanks Oliver, that's no problem then :)
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Hi. Unfrtunately I haven't
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Hi.
Unfortunately I haven't been logging in (Einstein@home) for a while since I actually read my statistics in BOINCstats. So I happen to have lost my statistics. But I really do understand the background. I have read all the updates of you now Olliver and I thank you for the good work. (Sorry to not follow the class.....)
Aane
Mumak escribió:Well, I missed
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Same here.
Hopefully anyone realizing
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Hopefully anyone realizing that their stats are not showing up can come enable export and they will show up again. If not, this is a MAJOR problem. But, there is another major problem... Einstein NOT exporting all users just gave me a HUGE jump. Like up 1950 spots in one day on BOINCStats. I realize that the GPDR or whatever it is, says you can't IDENTIFY the owners of those 1950+ "missing" rows, but for the stats to be ACCURATE, you can't just ignore them, either. You can assign a random identifying number, or whatever, but the DATA can't be thrown out with the identifier. This is like saying "we got a gravity wave signal that is off the charts, but we can't tell exactly where it came from, so we're just going to ignore it." Yet another unintended consequence of a stupid law and a flawed attempt to comply with it...
Shawn Kwang wrote:@Greg, (I
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If this interpretation is correct, then you have some problems you haven't thought of yet. "Any information they give to us" INCLUDES THE RESULTS OF THEIR CALCULATIONS! If this is your interpretation, please immediately go through and delete every affected result, change all of your scientific papers written as a consequence of these calculations, etc... Methinks you are getting some very bad legal advice. The GDPR is all about IDENTIFYING people, not throwing out every piece of data collected. If you throw out the stats, why are the calculations themselves any different? It's all data. Maybe you should ask your "legal advisors" about the use of all these years of collected data - and if they just say "oh no you can't" (as I expect) or if they find some convenient loophole because they suddenly wake up - and then decide if you should be listening to them.
Bill,you can also see it
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Bill,
you can also see it the other way round: you are on a certain place/spot among those who want to share their stats data with you. Other potentially existing users are just not relevant for statistics comparisons anyway. They might only care about the science they support, not the credit. Here's an analogy: there are far more people enjoying their daily running workout than those who enter competitions. You can never compete against the former group, and you probably don't even have an interest in that. That said, everyone who cares about credit competition at all will certainly return to the stats sites if they haven't done so already. Everyone else just isn't part of the competition, and it's their choice to make. This is the power and freedom these people are given now by the GDPR.
Please let's try and keep this discussion on the technical side of things. This isn't the place to discuss political or legal matters. Also, there's NO NEED TO SHOUT. You can always use the existing formatting options to stress your points.
Thank you,
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
Well, I lost ~170M. I've
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Well, I lost ~170M. I've enabled the option. I hope we can get those credits back.
As you can see on the left,
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As you can see on the left, your credits are still alive. They'll reappear on all participating external sites in due course.
Cheers
Einstein@Home Project
Oliver Behnke wrote:Hi
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Ok, i realised my situation,when i checked my Boincstats-status today and found out that my einstein@home points were missing. Boincstats only shows my Milkyway and Rosetta score now (14 774 total) and almost 300 million einstein@home credits are missing.
I changed my privacy settings and renewed my CPID. Is that all i need to do, besides waiting?
Bill Michael
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Thanks for the clarification. I hope that the first case be fulfilled.
I'm also in the same situation of remembering to login late and lose the data in boinc stats :S
Eskomorko wrote:I changed my
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Changing the privacy setting "Do you consent to exporting your data to BOINC statistics aggregation Web sites?" to yes should suffice. Then wait for the daily (or 2 times a day?) stats export from the project and your favorite stats site to pick up the new data and import it and all should be good again.
Although you might/will loose daily/weekly/monthly etc. history, but the totals and RAC should show as current again and matching what you see on your account here at this site (minus anything accumulated since the export).
Everything is now back to
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Everything is now back to normal. Thank you for your reply.
My RAC suddenly skyrocketed from 280 000 to 450 000 which is a good thing
I see my history was restored
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I see my history was restored after fixing my settings (not sure what happened, I'd've sworn I updated it beforehand); which based on comments made prior to the switch I wasn't expecting to happen. This has me wondering if the old data will be stored but not shown on sites like boincstats indefinitely or if after some grace period anyone who hasn't realized their stats are gone will have their old data permanently deleted.
At least BOINCstats told us
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At least BOINCstats told us they delete the data right away. Again, whatever we export (see privacy policy) will of course be restored as soon as you give your consent. Any historical data will be gone, though.
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
Mumak wrote:Thanks Oliver,
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As expected, there you are: https://boincstats.com/en/stats/5/user/detail/618422
Einstein@Home Project
guizalan wrote:Well, I lost
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... and so are you: https://boincstats.com/en/stats/5/user/detail/638941
Einstein@Home Project
It seems that many people
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It seems that many people didn't read the notice. Especially people who are attached to many projects and become saturated with notices to the point of ignoring them, or they don't know English
For my country Argentina, in the global stats we was around a thousand, now we are less than ten
https://boincstats.com/en/stats/5/user/list/0/0/Argentina
https://signature.statseb.fr/index.py?projet=15&country=Argentina
https://stats.free-dc.org/usercountry/eah/Argentina
The same with other countries.
I changed the option to YES
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I changed the option to YES but only after discovering that I lost my 88,000 Einstein@home credits. Waiting to see if they come back.
Sorry, I'm leaving both
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Sorry, I'm leaving both einstein and albert because I feel robbed. Minus 10% of the overall statistics!
It seems that many people
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I'd say hardly anyone read the notice. It reminds me of Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy where the earthlings were told it was their own fault their world was being destroyed. After all the notice had been in a filing cabinet on an important planet for viewing for several months. You would think the fact that one had explicitly given permission for the project to contact one by email would be a hint that important notices should be sent out by email. Sending out on Twitter is obviously useless. Putting it in the forums is useless because most people either never go to the forums or only go there when something is not working. A Boincstats message is a bit better, but I would say I am far from being alone in not reading them frequently enough to see even a majority of the messages. An email from a source that rarely sends me email on the other hand gets my attention. It even worked with WGC who send out more messages than anyone else. I get it that sending out emails doesn't get to everyone. But at least if people have actually asked to be informed by email, it would seem to be the right thing to do to honour that. Every other website where I have an account where there was a requirement to consent to a new privacy policy within a certain time or things would break sent me an email notification. The rest got my attention at the next login.
GDPR in general has been one SNAFU after another. This seems to be one of the worse ones. Panic in the face of an unlikely legal risk and then realise a bigger risk by screwing over most of your volunteer supporters.
--miw
Woops, I missed it like many
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Woops, I missed it like many others! Didn't see it until now. As long as the research gets done I'm satisfied but the score is a fun thing to track.:)
Looking forward to bumping back up on BAM in a few days!
miw wrote:Sending out on
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Well, your BOINC Manager (client software) should also have shown the relevant notifications. There's only so much we can do and sending out mass emails isn't straight-forward either.
Let me repeat again: your credits will be back on the external stats sites as soon as you give your consent to share those details with them.
Best,
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
Done!!!!
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Done!!!!
miw escribió:GDPR in general
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I agree.
This policy completely cancels the promotion of the project in the lists of projects linked in the user pages of other projects, reduce the users in boinc.netsoft-online.com, signature.statseb.fr, boincstats.com, stats.free-dc.org and others that are a key to share the participation and promote the incorporation of new users.
@OLIVER BEHNKE In the
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@OLIVER BEHNKE
In the new year when staff come back to work, will the E@H project accounts be turned back on for stats export?
DanNeely wrote:will the E@H
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Hi Dan, sorry, I don't understand the question. If this is about your stats, then please re-read this thread.
Cheers,
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
As expected in my worst
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As expected in my worst dreams, my team is now shrinked from more than 800 people to 43 in Boincstats.
What Einstein@Home has done is clear so far (fullfill their view of the law). But that boincstats deleted all existing stats seems again far far more than needed. The good thing is that other stats pages are not so extremistic and kept the old stats, maybe they will not be updated any more, but they are still existing.
*headbanging*
Oliver Behnke wrote:DanNeely
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No, my question was about the accounts that at various times represented work done by entities associated with the E@H program which ran BOINC when not needed for other internal computing tasks. All 6 of these accounts (names as shown publicly before the export wipe) are I believe current/former official program accounts:
ATLAS AEI Hannover
Armin Burkhardt speaking for MPI/FKF
LIGO Hanford Observatory
AEI eScience group, for the German Grid (D-Grid)
Atlas Admins E@H secondary account
Steffen Grunewald, for Merlin/Morgane
Edit: I'm not sure this is a complete list either. I only snapshotted the first page of stats prior to the wipe; but thought at one point both LIGO locations had accounts listed in the stats.
Well, Privacy Policy for
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Well, Privacy Policy for change is well written and understandable what where and how is data used. That's the way I like it.
Good job.
MagicEye wrote:As expected in
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Well, that's the prerogative of the team members themselves. If you think they didn't get the memo yet, let them know via team email (or ask the admin/founder to send it for you, if you can't).
Nope, that's what Art. 17 GDPR requires BOINCstats to do and they are based in Europe as well, so I bet they just don't want to risk being sued, in particular since they are (rather: "he is") just a non-profit spare-time project.
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
DanNeely wrote:No, my
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That's up to the respective facility admins to decide. We as the E@H project don't have control over those accounts and we're not in close contact to be able to tell if and when they might re-publish their stats.
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
Hendrik wrote:Well, Privacy
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Thanks Hendrik, we appreciate that! However, while having actually written the policy ourselves this is another one of GDPR's actual benefits to the users: it legally requires you to write such a policy a) at all and b) "in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language" (Art. 12). That's what we tried to do because we think it's a real benefit for our volunteers and also in our own interest.
Cheers
Einstein@Home Project
Oliver Behnke wrote:DanNeely
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Is whoever's in charge of the accounts even aware that it's an issue. Somehow I doubt those people are reading the forums or ever looking at boinc manager notice tabs which since the opt in to be emailed by the project feature wasn't used are the only public means to even let anyone know that it's an issue.
DanNeely wrote:Is whoever's
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Probably not, also because it isn't an "issue" - for those contributors anyway. They are contributing cycles for the science, not for the credits. Apart from that they can still measure or compare their contributions (should they indeed care or should someone ask about those) to the top 100 using our local statistics pages.
Also, from the accounts you mentioned only the ATLAS and MPI/FKF ones are still active. I'll give both a shout but it's obviously up to them to decide how they handle their exports.
Best,
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
I consented to the data
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I consented to the data export privacy control a few days ago.
i am still missing 171M credits on boincstats.
I have dozens of machines I donate to the cause, I have detached them all from Einstein at Home until this problem is resolved.
It seems pretty outrageous to me that they (boincstats) would shit on people helping the cause for free. It demonstrates a clear lack of understanding on how GDPR actually works. Deleting historical stats export scores which contain no personal infomration at all and were submitted prior to GDPR this means someone didn't do their homework for GDPR compliance and took a lazy blunt approach to how they thought it should be managed.
I know the internet is full of muppets, idiots, lazy people and dumbasses but i didn't expect to be exposed to them on Boincstats of all places.
togethia wrote:I know the
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Please review our guidelines on forum moderation and reconsider your language. Please edit your post accordingly.
Apart from that: how about these stats?
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
Thanks to GDPR there's only 2
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Thanks to GDPR there's only 2 people on my team now. Everyone else is invisible. BOINC stats aren't even close to being personal information so why the chickendung decision to comply with the stupid Europeans? Lame.
Part of the Funding and
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Part of the Funding and support for the Einstein@home project comes from Max Planck Gesellschaft an organization based out of Berlin. Since Germany is part of the EU they must comply with EU laws and regulations the same as we do when we follow US laws and regulations.
If you want to be part of a World Class organization you have to follow the rules and have a little "class". If not you can go run Goofy Grid ... opps they are offline.
Respectfully
Bill F
In October of 1969 I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;
There was no expiration date.
Horribleron wrote:Thanks to
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Well, either they didn't get the memo or they chose to be invisible. The latter is the whole purpose of those privacy settings and the former could be dealt with by team-internal communication to bring them up to speed.
Cheers
Einstein@Home Project
Oliver Behnke wrote:Probably
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Well if you really think/believe this, i would suggest to stop/disable stats at all (saves a lot of hassle), and see how much contribution will be left...
Looking at the numbers;
Hosts with credit: 1,767,112
Host active last two weeks: 36,080
Seems lot of those users "contributing because of the science/cause" didn't care enough to stay (also take into account hosts have more cores nowadays, so less are needed). I'm not saying this is because of the stats issues, but apparently they are not so committed.
As for me; i was considering to contribute again (been a while), but as crunching for science is not most exciting hobby out there, and it cost quite some time and effort/money (at least having multiple machines). I have 1 rule; no stats, no contribution!
Another thing: now this "GDPR" option is implemented, i assume stats dumps will be available again for everyone, not just registered downloaders?
Theadalus wrote:Oliver Behnke
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Well, the context of that quote dealt with a very specific set of users who I personally know, not the general volunteer population.
No, these are two different things. As I outlined earlier, we're legally obliged to notify downstream data consumers if any of our data subjects (legal speak for volunteers) enacts its right to be forgotten. In order to be able to comply with that we ask wannabe consumers of our stats to register. So no, no direct anonymous stats downloads.
Best,
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
I can't believe that NO one
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I can't believe that NO one has made a comment since 30 Jan. 2019. I've been user since its inception and have lost my data/stats a few times since then (lost emails and/or login details). One thing I find to be the most frustrating is the complexity of the whole thing, as trying to get new users (non-science/computer folks) to use BOINC as they quit before they get started due to all the back and forth to set it all up. You would think for a science based system it would be more up to date and operate more seamlessly and have a better GUI.
Why do you do what you do, when you know what you know?
Delta9SFBay
Wayne
Hi,Please clarify what
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Hi,
Please clarify what exactly you're discussing in your message ("it", "whole thing"). I presume you're talking about BOINC, the software and not (really) about BOINC the ecosystem, or Einstein@Home the project?
Cheers,
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project