User Opt-in Consent

The ​European GDPR law requires users to opt-in to a terms of service. "Users who want to sign-up to a (BOINC) project need to give their informed explicit consent to how the project processes their data, before any personally identifiable information about that new user gets processed/stored by the project. This opt-in statement of consent then needs to tracked by the project as proof."

Additionally, existing users will need to opt-in to the same terms of service, with their consent date saved.

User Experience

Existing code

As of April 2018, BOINC already contains a 'terms of use' mechanism for the BOINC client when creating a new account. If the file 'terms_of_use.txt' (filename is hardcoded) is in the root of the project directory, the contents of the file will be presented to the user when s/he creates an account. However, there is no persistent 'storing' of the datetime the user consented to the terms of use.

The BOINC Web code does not have the ability to sign up directly (this statement has not yet been confirmed). If not, it would have to also use this terms-of-use mechanism.

Additionally, it is not known whether account managers, such as BAM!, use this terms-of-use mechanism.

Technical Implementation

Two new tables: consent and consenttype

• consent
  • id - the user id
  • consent_id - consent id
  • consent_time - datetime type attriute : unixtime of when user id gave consent to consent_id. If zero, user has not consented (yet).

• consent_type
  • consent_id - consent id
  • description - text field describing the consent that user gives (or has given).

It is likely at first there will be one record in consent_type: the main terms-of-use a user consents to when joining the project. The consent table uses id and consent_id as the primary key, so a single user may consent to multiple items. This allows for flexibility - a project may decide to present a user with multiple items to consent to. Each can be recorded in the consent table with a different consent_id, whose description is stored in the consent_type table.

RPC

The main RPC that needs to be changed is create_account.php, which needs to insert a record into the consent table when the user creates his/her account- assuming s/he consents to a site's terms of use.

Web site

(to be written)