Crunching the Crunched Numbers

[Aquinus]

Does the EU need a Trump thump?

I'm more annoyed that I'm being forced into a legal agreement even should I choose to serve only non-EU citizens. I'm more than happy to protect people's information but, I don't like being essentially coerced into it, even outside of the EU which is beyond the purview of the EU council.

 

[Norton]

Bok over at FreeDC posted in his forum on this issue:

No WCG stats for now

World Community Grid have switched off anonymous access to both the xml stats used for overall stats as well as access to the API's I use to get badge data and subproject data.

I've requested access to the former which *should* be granted via userid/pw at some point, but I'm unsure whether there will be access to the badge and subproject data again.​

https://www.free-dc.org/showthread.php?56848-No-WCG-stats-for-now

WCG also added an option (Opt-in) to display your data- see link in the article below (near the bottom):
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewNewsArticle.do?articleId=561

 

[Arjai]

Unfortunately due to the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, WCG no longer lets me collect this information despite having asked all of you for your verification codes. I've contacted WCG requesting an access token to continue to work on this project but, that may only allow you to get your own information and I won't know more until I hear back from IBM. It's possible that the GDPR just killed this project.

See the post here, https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/have-you-got-pie-today.93832/post-3846848

Essentially you ask for access and then sign a contract to abide by the new policy and you get a token to use that will give you access to those who have not blocked their info. Or to accounts that have been deleted.

 

[Aquinus]

They switched off authorized access with verification codes as well. I can't even pull my own info using my own verification code.

See the post here, https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/have-you-got-pie-today.93832/post-3846848

Essentially you ask for access and then sign a contract to abide by the new policy and you get a token to use that will give you access to those who have not blocked their info. Or to accounts that have been deleted.

It's a little more than that. If a user deletes their info while I'm building this service, I will be legally obligated to delete all of this user's associated info. It's IBM literally absolving themselves of any wrongdoing should anyone try to sue under the guise of GDPR. It puts the legal obligation on me. With that said, I already asked for the token and they told me that the paperwork isn't ready yet so, I have to wait here patiently anyways should I choose to sign it.

 

[Aquinus]

For what it's worth:

Hello again Jon,

Correct. IBM is adopting the GDPR policies globally. You may find more information about the changes here: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewNewsArticle.do?articleId=561

Thank you for your support,

World Community Grid Support Team
---------------------------------------------------------
World Community Grid

I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

 

[XZero450]

@Aquinus, IBM is doing what every organization that I have been a part of because it's easier and cheaper to build for the most secure and put everything in that basket rather than to keep things isolated and managed separately. In addition to that, we have a trend in the world right now when it comes to privacy in that many other countries may soon adopt similar laws and IBM might as well be pro-active.

I would recommend that if you do continue with this project that you do so as part of an LLC or similar and put the onus on an entity that you control, rather than your person. The price for data is about to go up, and so will the cost of liability.

What I would have preferred to see IBM do is to keep machine stats separate from people/users and left everything open. Thus, you could trend machines, and the owners of said machines would know which ones were theirs, and then it would be entirely up to the owners to enable trending/sharing of their statistics. Having not read the new legal article, I may be off base with possibilities.

 

[Norton]

@Aquinus

Do you have any experience with web page/screen scraping? If so, it may be able to salvage this project by grabbing the data that way.

I'm currently grabbing our numbers from a WCG page daily and dumping the data into a spreadsheet. This page:
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/...Id=S8TLJ6TFV1&pageNum=1&numRecordsPerPage=250

My method is crude but it works, there's likely many ways to do it better

Thoughts?