Greetings,
I have seen the different documentation talking about the capability and how to assign roles to allow the downloading of personal data (for GDPR compliance). However, I can't find anywhere the tool that actually does this - either for the user or the admin user. Where can the student user or administrator actually perform this function?
Thanks!
Alan
It's in the second part of this video. (Note the video is Moodle 3.5 - the wordings have changed a bit for Moodle 3.6 but the location (in your profile) is still the same
Thanks Mary,
I think I see the flow now. When I have tested, though, in 3.5.3 I do the following:
1. Submit a data export request by the student
2. Approve the request
3. go back as the student. Even though I approved the request, it shows as "rejected" in the student login. I am guessing this is a bug in 3.5.3?
Yes it is a bug - see here MDL-64030 - and it has been fixed.
Thanks Mary. I did upgrade to 3.6.1 and now see that it shows correctly on new requests. However, I was expecting a link, as a student, to download the data somewhere in that approved request. Where does the student actually get the file to download?
Alan
They should get it by going to their profile and clicking Data requests as in this screenshot:
I see, I don't have a status of download ready so my only action is cancel request. I thought I saw somewhere in a forum (but don't see it now) about possibly a cron job that needs to run - but I don't see anything obvious. It has been several hours since the request has been approved, but not overnight. This is on 3.6.1. I manually ran the cron.php but that didn't seem to do anything.
I see possibly this might be the issue:
A site purpose and
category have not been defined. When these are not defined, all data
will be removed when processing deletion requests.
But I can't figure out where these are defined.
Alan
To define a site purpose and category you need to go to Site administration / Users / Data registry - see the section in the document Data privacy
OK, that message is now gone. Thanks for pointing me there!
However, my system never gets past the approved state. I never get a pending or a ready to download status for the requests. I have manually run the cron job (and it doesn't show an error) - admin/cli/cron.php. Anything else I might be missing that would cause this? I am still doing my testing on my 3.6.1 test system.
Alan
Sorry - I'm not too au fait with cron and the like but I'm replying to highlight your post again in the hope that someone else might have a suggestion?
Hi Mary,
Thanks for your help. I think I am getting closer. I realized that I had set the defaults for the data registry and created a category and Purpose but didn't "save changes" so they actually were not being used (even though they showed on the screen as being defined). It did give me the message at the top that they weren't defined but I couldn't figure out why. That went away after I finally actually applied them.
So, I can run the cron.php between my different submission/accept processes now to get the testing done faster. I see now things processing correctly. I am now to getting things to a download ready and can download the file, but it is a 0 byte zip file. I tried setting the retention period from 0 to 50 in my purpose but that didn't matter (I figured 0 would be an indefinite period but maybe not).
I only have one general category at the site level and 1 policy at the site level. I don't have anything below that.
We are not asking users to specifically accept our policy on this site, since we are handling this through other methods (contractual, some consent with other forms). So, for this site, they just really need to be able to pull their data.
Any thoughts on why there would be 0 byte zips? Also, I can't find any documentation that talks about what is included in the export. Have you seen a list of this anywhere?
Thanks!!
Alan
Hey Alan
I am testing the data requests functionality on 3.6.1 as well and have found that a student "export" request after being approved by the admin stays in a perpetual state of "processing". I have the data registries defined and have 'set' their defaults. ;)
And now I'm reading more issues on this where a delete request shows complete, but then the user data is not correctly removed from the database. See comments in MDL-62915
So I'd like to help out and mirror you getting this all figured out. My end goal being to document a best practice.
Ray
Hi Ray,
The "Processing" stage means that data for that user is being located and compiled into an downloadable zip file for the user. This process can be quite time-intensive and the time required will vary based on the amount of data, and the type of data that the user holds on your site.
Andrew
Hi Ray and Andrew,
One thing that is helpful is to go in and run the cron manually after (in admin/cli) after the request has been approved which forces it to create the zip (and you can also see it being processed). I finally was able to get the zip able to be downloaded, but it has 0 bytes. For the defaults, in terms of permissions, I didn't change anything - it is all as inherit. Maybe one has to set something explicitly there to have things exported?
That would be great to have better documentation in this area.
Thanks
Alan
Alan
Clearly there are some gaps here in the documentation for this functionality, but that is to be expected at this early stage of the new functionality.
Are you referring to the data registry “defaults”?
I only created one Category and one Purpose, and let the rest inherit.
Thanks
Ray
Yes, that is what I was referring to. I did the same as you. I think, then, it should allow all data to be downloaded (I have a 50 year retention period for testing). But, alas, a 0 byte zip file.
Andrew
Thanks for that info.
My cron runs once a minute, so is there a “different” script that needs to run to process the zip file.
If not, then seven days later it is STILL in the “processing “ status.
Thanks
Ray
