Hi Guys
Just to add a bit of context. Historical queries currently show the history of
a resource object back to the most recent creation date. So if an object is
created, modified several times, deleted, re-created, modified several times
all you can query is the modification history back to that re-creation point.
There is no community policy regarding this. It was an arbitrary decision made
(probably by me at the time) when we specified the historical query feature a
few years ago. We were asked for this feature but there were no requirements
other than 'please show us some history'. From an implementation point of view
this was the 'low hanging fruit' to get a feature developed in a reasonable
amount of time. The full history of resource objects going back decades is
still available in the database.
Roll the clock forward and GDPR kicks in. It seems now that much of the data IS
considered to be 'personal'. Even nic-hdls are considered to be personal data
as they can be used to identify an individual. Also there is the issue of the
reuse of nic-hdls for many years. So a nic-hdl from a resource object that
existed say in 2008 may exist in the database today but it may be a different
person.
There is also the issue that the database has never differentiated between
personal and corporate data. PERSON and ROLE objects are interchangeable and
can be used in exactly the same way in the same places. ORGANISATION objects
may also contain personal rather than corporate data. Any attribute that holds
name, address, phone, email, nic-hdl, organisation data may hold personal data.
So all of this has to be removed from any historical data that is made
available. There has never even been any best common practice guidelines saying
where personal and corporate data should/should not be used. Except for
"abuse-c:". When we implemented that we clearly stated that it should NOT be
personal data and will always be made publicly available without any
obfuscation.
What you end up with is a bare bones object. For people trying to research
historical links between objects that existed at some point in history all
those links have been removed. If we move towards removing personal data from
the database, say we deprecate the PERSON object, then nic-hdls will no longer
identify any individual. In that case there would be no need to remove them
from historical data. As for address, emails and phone, these would still have
to be removed. To preserve the links between objects in historical data they
could be replaced by unique keys. In a one time update all addresses, emails,
phones etc could be assigned a unique key which can be added to versions of
objects in the database as meta data. When a historical object is queried the
key could be shown in place of the actual data. This could be made searchable.
That would allow researchers to follow these links across objects and time.
Just a few thoughts....
cheersdenis
co-chair DB-WG
On Wednesday, 18 December 2019, 12:17:12 CET, Sander Steffann
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
> I suspect Sander and myself have just been volunteered. :-)
👍🏻
Sander
