nikobojs / manuscrape_electron

ManuScrape desktop app for Windows 11
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The essential (and solvable) compliance issue #83

Open nikobojs opened 6 months ago

nikobojs commented 6 months ago

Compliance is important for researchers and in general people who share data-ethical values with those presented in EU.

Right now, observation images are uploaded uncensored before the anonymization/editing takes place. The uncensored images are overwritten when the anonymized version is published. This leaves an uncensored image in the fileserver (minio) for an unknown time period.

The server administrator would thus have access to uncensored media. This shouldn't be a problem in many organizations, as they (hopefully) host their own ManuScrape servers. But for researchers, this is a very important concern, and might even require extra work, like crafting GDPR documents or having meetings with experts.

It also makes working with third party ManuScrape hosting more complicated and expensive, as the data processor could potentially end up with sensitive personal attributable data from people who never gave their consent.

We can fix completely this by adding local image editing support to the image editor. By doing this, we can ensure that all images are edited/anonymized before upload. The image editor would even work without internet, which is a good thing for performance, resilience and user-experience. The server load would decrease as well, which would make shared servers faster for everyone. However the main value proposition is compliance.

It is a doable and could potentially create more refactor tasks along the way.