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With the new general data protection regulation (GDPR) - formally published on May 4th, 2016 - the context is shifting: Although on the one hand the regulation brings the advantage of better alignment in Europe, it also places some further limits on the ground for data processing, and for global collaboration there are many factors (including the Privacy Shield work) that drive change. In the 2nd year of AARC we will investigate new approaches that align with the new environment - and still keep the collaboration from within Europe with the world at large - including approaches inspired by the 'corporate rules' mechanism and its potential applicability to coordinated e-Infrastructures and research infrastructures.
Under current legislation, only Model Contracts and Binding Corporate Rules appear to offer the framework required to transfer personal data within trans-national science e-Infrastructures. With hundreds of resource providers and user communities potentially exchanging data, it is impossible to conceive of each party executing a separate, legal agreement with all others as might be required by the standard use of Model Contracts. One possible solution is where each party would sign an adherence form acknowledging compliance with a Code of Conduct (as referred in GDPR Article 46.2(e)) . The signed form is then lodged with the federation. This approach, still a work-in-progress, remains a relatively complex, somewhat lengthy legal document, which may hinder adoption.
We propose the BCR-inspired model as presented above as a suitable basis for distributed collaborative infrastructures where many independent organizations (with the user communities and their members represented in their professional capacity by their home organizations) collaborate within a well-controlled policy framework - which is a characteristic of most of the cross-national Infrastructures and the AARC selected use cases. For reference, the policy template Policy on the Processing of Personal Data developed jointly with EGI, WLCG, and GridPP, has been appended to this Recommendation.
- Recommendations and template policies for the processing of personal data
We would like to point out that this effort is focused on the protection of personal data that is generated as a result of participants working within the federated infrastructure. If you are about to exchange (research) data that in and of itself contains (sensitive) personal data, or where the combination of your data set with other data sets can result in the inference of personal or sensitive data, including other research data, please consult with your user community. E.g. for biomedical research data, look at ELIXIR and national initiatives.