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Thread: Has the Universe gone under ?

  1. #1

    Question Has the Universe gone under ?


  2. #2
    Senior Member Dirk Broer's Avatar
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    Check your Universe@Home settings [in edit mode] for data export...


  3. #3
    I am surprised that free-DC - knowing the reason - DELETES user data from their statistics if the latest export does not include that user.
    DELETION requires much more activity than stagnation.
    Maybe their reason is to draw attention to the situation?
    But if you access free-DC, you receive the announcement anyway - there's no justification for deletion.
    When Universe-users - or other-users in a similar situation - authorise export, free-dc needs to re-establish the user, which costs more activity.
    Free-DC could easily be smarter.

  4. #4
    Administrator Bok's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnMD View Post
    I am surprised that free-DC - knowing the reason - DELETES user data from their statistics if the latest export does not include that user.
    DELETION requires much more activity than stagnation.
    Maybe their reason is to draw attention to the situation?
    But if you access free-DC, you receive the announcement anyway - there's no justification for deletion.
    When Universe-users - or other-users in a similar situation - authorise export, free-dc needs to re-establish the user, which costs more activity.
    Free-DC could easily be smarter.
    This is GDPR - a European regulation which enforces that we delete any kind of personal data if a user has not consented to it. We may not agree to it, but if we don't do it automatically there are financial penalities..

  5. #5
    Senior Member Dirk Broer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bok View Post
    This is GDPR - a European regulation which enforces that we delete any kind of personal data if a user has not consented to it. We may not agree to it, but if we don't do it automatically there are financial penalities..
    But would GDPR -properly executed- not force FreeDC to let all its users give their consent to show their data too? Note that BOINCstats -Dutch based, so within immediate GDPR enforcement area- merely has chosen not to display updates for Universe until a greater number of users have given their consent.

    Me personally I think that if you have an account at either BOINCstats and/or FreeDC you should by default have the setting allow data export, otherwise your membership of a stats site doesn't make sense.


  6. #6
    Administrator Bok's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dirk Broer View Post
    But would GDPR -properly executed- not force FreeDC to let all its users give their consent to show their data too? Note that BOINCstats -Dutch based, so within immediate GDPR enforcement area- merely has chosen not to display updates for Universe until a greater number of users have given their consent.

    Me personally I think that if you have an account at either BOINCstats and/or FreeDC you should by default have the setting allow data export, otherwise your membership of a stats site doesn't make sense.
    It's somewhat of a gray area to be honest, but early on when they were implementing this in BOINC, some of the major sites disabled access to the xml files altogether and implemented user/pw rules only for sites that would enforce GDPR. It may have been a little over the top, but within their rights. At that point I implemented the code to delete. It does not delete immediately but is currently set to do the hard delete after the 5th real update of an individual projects stats where the user no longer exists. In the case of Universe@Home this is pretty quick as the xml is updated every 2 hours or so.

    If it was seti, this would actually be 5 days as they update once per day.

    Maybe time to take another look and extend this period more. I'll change it to be 30 updates.

    I think for Boincstats I think it accidentally did not delete as they have a mechanism from much longer ago to stop updates if the xml files are a lot smaller than last time. Honestly that may strictly take them out of compliance, though it's highly unlikely there would be any ramifications.

  7. #7
    Thank you, thank you. It was driving me nuts. Thank you so very much Dirk for providing the link for me to fix it rather than just telling me I have to fix it some how. Well done. You may not be able to affect what they did but you did a great job of helping some of us get past it.

  8. #8
    Senior Member Dirk Broer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by fractal View Post
    Thank you, thank you. It was driving me nuts. Thank you so very much Dirk for providing the link for me to fix it rather than just telling me I have to fix it some how. Well done. You may not be able to affect what they did but you did a great job of helping some of us get past it.
    I have a past (and I'd hope a future) in user support -presently redundant though...


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