GDPR compliance

On May 25th, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) considers GDPR an improvement in protection of Internet user rights, and in general an important step towards better general awareness of issues like online privacy and data ownership.

GDPR compliance on FKI and related websites

FKI has always taken online privacy very seriously. The FKI website, as well as the one of the Free Technology Academy, the wikis managed by FKI, Mailman, LimeSurvey and other systems, do not collect any user data in the first place, or track users in any way, with the following exceptions:

• technical cookies that are absolutely needed to allow user login
• email addresses of the registered users to the websites or wikis, that are needed to send technical information, updates, or password recovery information, to the users themselves

none of those data are shared in any way with third parties.

Personal data visible through FKI websites and services

FKI hosts several public mailing lists, wikis, and sometimes runs online courses through the Free Technology Academy, which have some public sections. Therefore, information voluntarily provided by the users of those services on those channels is accessible to online search engines, and other “web-scraping” software. However this is generally not personal information, unless one voluntarily exposes its details in such conversations..

Third party services

Occasionally, due to lack of time or resources, FKI may have no other choice but to use third party services such as eg. EventBrite or Google Forms to handle registrations for an event, collect signatures for some documents or run online polls. In all such cases, the privacy and data management policies of those services apply.

CommonsCloud

FKI is co-founder and initiator of the CommonsCloud, which is developing and setting in motion a cooperatively owned and replicable cloud infrastructure. The use of the platform is designed to put the individual users and collectives in charge of what and how they want to share their data and projects. Our intention is to gradually move our infrastructure into the CommonsCloud and/or interconnect with it. This will reduce the need to rely on EventBrites, Google Forms and the likes. The specific details of the GDPR compliance of the CommonsCloud are developed by the CommonsCloud Alliance and should be checked there.