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I am currently developing a Website which allows users to create Blog-posts and was wondering whether I should allow them to delete their Posts from the Database. On one hand, they could be writing illegal stuff and delete it shortly afterwards, which would make it impossible to follow up on this issue afterwards, on the other I might have to provide such a feature. I was thinking about implementing a "soft-deletion", which allows users to mark a posts as deleted and deleting all marked posts after a couple of weeks.
My question now is whether this approach would be legal, especially considering the GDPR. How would you go about it?
I'm aware that I might be in the wrong community (Stackoverflow) here and am open for suggestions for other forums.
Edit
The website is hosted and has its Guests mostly in Germany. Does anybody know about the lokal laws and how they play for this problem?
GDPR is only concerned with personal data, which is data connected with people, so if I write a blog post that doesn't contain any personal data, GDPR simply doesn't enter into it except for identifying me as its author. With that link removed, it's just regular data.
If you consider the blog post along with its author identification as a single item, then it would count as personal data, and they could ask for it to be deleted. There is some wiggle room for practicality here though. You can reasonably do as you suggest and soft delete now and really delete later, but you should make it clear in your privacy policy that that is what you are going to do. You could cite a reasonable case of legitimate interest to allow for letting data fall off the end of backup cycles, allowing a grace period for them to change their mind, accidental deletion, and abuse.
A separate issue is copyright, which remains with the author regardless of whether they are credited (unless for example they write it under contract to you and waived their rights or assigned ownership to you).
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Just found about this new regulation, it will be law in 2018 and affects anybody who stores data about EU citizens, that can be used to identify a person. More detail here.
I have a page that doesn't store names and exact addresses but it stores birth dates and country/city as location and uses these two to provide a service (which is the core service, so I can't just stop collecting these data).
From what I understand I have to take some action to ensure compliance with GDPR, but I haven't found reasonable explanations what that means. There is a dozen articles that rephrase paragraphs of GDPR, that is not helping at all.
I don't mind full deletion, explaing what data I store to the users and simmilar points ... What I am mostly worried about is the part about anonymizing data so in case of a breach they can not be used to identify a person. How am I supposed to do that? If I store an email address used to verify an user account and tie birth date and location data via PK to that verified email, they are no longer anonymous ... and they can't be, right?
Any thought about practical solutions to become GDPR compliant?
Ultimately, in the UK, the GDPR will be enforced by the ICO - Information Commissioners Office. Whilst some of the regulation is quite clear cut, the articles relating to anonymisation are open to interpretation and we'll probably only fully understand how the line is drawn once the ICO has enforced a case relating to it. Having said that there is a bunch of good info on their site.
Their is also a group of academics in the UK advising both the ICO and businesses (for free) about anonymisation. They're called the UK Anonymisation Network - UKAN. I've had a web meeting with them - they're awesome.
It is unlikely you will have to anonymise your data if you use standard encryption to store your data at rest. Anonymisation may come in handy if you are sharing any of that data with third parties. In the event of a breach on their system, you can demonstrate you have taken as many steps as possible to mitigate your risk.
I agree with the above - GDPR is a great thing for privacy rights and data control - I also agree that there are a million sites out there just rephrasing gdpr!
In terms of practical steps, more guidance is going to be released by the ICO this month. But it makes sense to begin by mapping out what user data you process, whether the reasons for this are justified and whether there you have asked for EXPLICIT permission to use that data in that way. Further to this you should think about how you can delete data if it's requested.
There are services that will keep independent record of opt ins and alert you to data vulnerabilities. Anonomisation works in some cases, in others, if you have permission, then all you need is process to delete and an audit trail.
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As long as it's SQL injection proof, would it be alright for me to let non-members add comments to a post and give the Author the ability to delete them?
Before you do it, consider the following questions
(and any other questions specific to your project that may spring to mind)
Do you have a good rate-limiting scheme set up so a user can't just fill your hard drive with randomly-generated comments?
Do you have a system in place to automatically ban users / IP addresses who seem to be abusive? Do you have a limit on the number / number of kilobytes of comments loaded per page (so someone can't fill a page with comments, making the page take forever to load / making it easy to DoS you by making a lot of requests for that page)?
Is it possible to fold comments out of sight on the webpage so users can easily hide spammy comments they'd rather not see?
Is it possible for legitimate users to report spammy comments?
These are all issues that apply to full members, of course. But it also matters for anonymous users, and since anonymous posting is low-hanging fruit, a botmaster would be more likely to target that. The main thing is simply to consider "If I were a skilled programmer who hated this website, or wanted to make money from advertising on it, and I have a small botnet, what is the worst thing I could do to this website using anonymous comments given the resources I have?" And that's a tough question, which depends a great deal on what other stuff you have in place.
If you do it, here are a few pointers:
HTML-escape the comments when you fetch them from the database before you display them, otherwise you're open to XSS.
Make sure you never run any eval-like function on the input the user gives you (this includes printf; to do something like that you'd want to stick with printf("%s", userStr);, so printf doesn't directly try to interpret userStr. If you care about why that's an issue, google for Aleph One's seminal paper on stack smashing),
Never rely on the size of the input to fall within a specific range (even if you check this in Javascript; in fact, especially if you try to ensure this in Javascript) and
Never trust anything about the content will be true (make no assumptions about character encoding, for example. Remember, a malicious user won't need to use a browser; they can craft their calls however they want).
Default to paranoia If someone posts 20 comments in a minute, ban them from commenting for a while. If they keep doing that, ban their IP. If they're a real person, and they care, they'll ask you to undo it. Plus, if they're a real person, and they have a history of posting 20 comments a minute, chances are pretty good those comments would be improved by some time under the banhammer; no one's that witty.
Typically this kind of question depends on the type of community, as well as the control you give your authors. Definitely implement safety and a verification system (eg CAPTCHA), but this is something you'll have to gauge over time more often than not. If users are being well-behaved, then it's fine. If they start spamming every post they get their hands on, then it's probably time a feature like that should just go away.
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I need to add an item to our product backlog list that has no (perceived) value to the users.
Context: every week we need to parse and import a TXT file our system. Now the provider decided to change the format to XML, so we need to rewrite the parsing engine.
In the end the user won't see any benefit as he'll keep getting his new data, but we still have to do this to keep importing the data.
How to add an item like this to the product backlog list?
What happens if you don't make the change? Is there value to the user in preventing that from happening? If the answer is yes, I'd recommend tying your business value statement to that. Then, you can write a typical user story with business value and treat it like any other PBI.
It has no value to the user, but it has value to your company.
As company X I want to be able to support the new XML format so that I can keep importing data from provider Y.
How does that sound like? Not all stories necessarily evolve around the end user.
Note: technical stories and technical improvement stories are not a good practice and they should avoided. Why? Because you can't prioritize them correctly as they have no estimable value.
The correct way to do tech stories is to include them in the definition of done. For example: decide that every new story played is only complete once database access is via Dapper and not L2S. This is a viable DoD definition and makes sure you can evolve your system appropriately.
We typically just add it as a "technical improvement" and give it a priority that we think fits. If the user asks you about it, you just explain them high level what the change does and why it's needed.
Don't forget that your application will most likely start failing in the future if you don't make the change. Just tell them that, and let them decide whether they want that or not.
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Most of you certainly use some kind of bugtracker. Maybe internally only, once a customer files a bug via email or phone you add a new ticket by yourself. Sometimes weekly project meetings can be great source of new tickets coming preferably in flavors of excel sheets that the PM on the other side of the table loves to maintain and chase after you.
The more advanced (and transparent) version: Allow the customer to file (and see the progress of) his bugs directly into you bugtracker. Systems like JIRA allow you to use profiles to have certain access rights, etc.
But now the question: The bug raised by a user not necessary translates into 1 bug in a specific module/method/EJB/class. The version of the (your) web application he uses does not translate into the version of the class that is causing the error. How you maintain the internal part of the ticket with all the nasty techy details and the same time the make-the-user-feel-good ticket (need more info, accepted, in progress,..) ? Creating 2 tickets for internal and external ? Link them ?
Any smart recipes to share ?
Separate your bug system from your customer support tracking system, and allow links between them.
Bugs can refer to zero, one or more customer support tickets.
Customer support tickets may refer to zero bugs (e.g. the customer's problem has nothing to do with your software), one bug (in case it's really a problem in your software) or more than one bug (shit happens).
Make queries like:
Which customers are waiting for a solution of bug X
Which customers are waiting on open critical bugs
Which bugs were already encountered by user Y
...
You will also notice that each database will have its own 'speed'. In my situation I have about 4 times more customer support calls than real bugs.
Most sensible way is to have two systems, or an alterantive mechanism for end users to submit bugs (via email). The main problem is not so much that a bug not necessarily translates into one method in a class, but mostly that if you have more than a handfull of users, peopel wont read existing bugs and think further than "button does not work".
If you isolate the real incident system (make it public, but read only), your staff can screen incoming bugs, make sur ethey are reproducable and have repro cases, check against existin bugs and in general have a clear bug once you enter it, and not soe hard to understand mess that may or may not ven make sense and be yet another entry of the same bug entered another 30 times already.
Each comment in JIRA has a "Viewable By" field that allows you to set the Group or Project Role to whom the comment is visible. You could use that to hide the "nasty techy details".
Alternatively you're probably on the right track when you say create two issues and link them. This has the added benefit of hiding your internal workflow from the customer.
One system for both (external) Help Desk and (internal) Issue Tracking. As long as you have complete control over visibility of tickets/issues, and can link between external/internal items, then this is no big deal.
Read more:
http://countersoft.com/downloads/whitepapers/Implementing_an_Issue_Management_Platform.pdf
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I have been thinking about setting up some sort of library for all our internally developed software at my organisation. I would like collect any ideas the good SO folk may have on this topic.
I figure, what is the point in instilling into developers the benefits of writing reusable code, if on the next project the first thing developers do is file -> new due to a lack of knowledge of what code is already out there to be reused.
As an added benefit, I think that just by having a library like this would encourage developers to think more in terms of reusability when writing code
I would like to keep this library as simple as possible, perhaps my only two requirements being:
Search facility
Usable for many types of components: assemblies, web services, etc
I see the basic information required on each asset/component to be:
Name & version
Description / purpose
Dependencies
Would you record any more information?
What would be the best platform for this i.e., wiki, forum, etc?
What would make a software library like this successful vs unsuccessful?
All ideas are greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Edit:
Found these similar questions after posting:
How do you ensure code is reused correctly?
How do you foster the use of shared components in your organization?
Sounds like there is no central repository of code available at your organization. Depending on what you do this could be because of compatmentalization of the knowledge due to security restrictions, the fact that external vendor code is included in some/all of the solutions, or your company has not yet seen the benefits of getting people to reuse, refactor, and evangelize the benefits of such a repository.
The common attributes of solutions I have seen work at mutiple corporations are a multi pronged approach.
Buy in at some level from the management. Usually it's a CTO/CIO that the idea resonates with and they claim it's a good thing and don't give any money to fund it but they won't sand in your way if they are aware that someone is going to champion the idea before they start soliciting code and consolidating it somewhere.
Some list of projects and the collateral available in english. Seen this on wikis, on sharepoint lists, in text files within a source repository. All of them share the common attribute of some sort of front end search server that allows full text over the description of a solution.
Some common share or repository for the binaries and / or code. Oftentimes a large org has different authentication/authorization methods for many different environments and it might not be practical (or possible logistically) to share a single soure repository - don't get hung up on that aspect - just try to get it to the point that there is a well known share/directory/repository that works for your org.
Always make sure there is someone listed as a contact - no one ever takes code and runs it in production without at lest talking to the previous owner of it - and if you don't have a person they can start asking questions of right away then they might just go ahead and hit file->new.
Unsuccessful attributes I've seen?
N submissions per engineer per time period = lots of crap starts making it's way in
No method of rating / feedback. If there is no means to favorite/rate/give some indicator that allows the cream to rise to the top you don't go back to search it often because you weren't able to benefit from everyone else's slogging through the code that wasn't really very good.
Lack of feedback/email link that contacts the author with questions directly into their email.
lack of ability to categorize organically. Every time there is some super rigid hierarchy or category list that was predetermined everything ends up in "other". If you use tags or similar you can avoid it.
Requirement of some design document to accompany it that is of a rigid format the code isn't accepted - no one can ever agree on the "centralized" format of a design doc and no one ever submits when this is required.
Just my thinking.