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The privacy in an e-Learning process

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TeSLA aims to put in place a system which allows the students to present their exams without any face-to-face meeting with the professors. This will give the advantage to avoid useless travel and to reduce the constraints for students who don’t have the financial resources to travel.

However, putting such a useful system in place requests vigilance to the legal constraints and, mainly, the ones concerning the data protection of the students involved in it. Indeed, the examination at distance will request the development of some invasive technics as the biometry tools which could impact the privacy of the participants.

In this contribution, we would like to highlight three principles which will have to be respected by the project:

• Information/consent: the participants who will be involved in such “at distance examination” will have to be informed about the system and about her/his rights in regards of the legislation on data protection. This information must be complete enough to allow her/him to accept, or not, her/his participation to the system. Indeed, a choice should be given to the participant between “face-to-face” examination and “at distance” one. With clear information, such a choice would be possible and will make the consent valid.

• Proportionality/necessity: both Directive 95/46 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data and the new European General Regulation on Data Protection (GRDP) impose that the process including the collect of data limited must be limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed. In other words, only relevant and necessary data can be collected and stored by TeSLA in a necessary process.  In consequence, TeSLA must ensure that the process of biometric data is necessary, the resulting loss of privacy is proportional to any anticipated benefit and whether a less privacy intrusive means could achieve the desired end. In the framework of the project developed by TeSLA, we can consider that the answers to these 3 questions are positive. Indeed, TeSLA must control the identity of the participant presenting the examination but also control if she/he is alone to perform it. This is the only way to trust the system.

• Data retention: following the data protection legislation, the data cannot be “kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data were collected or for which they are further processed”. This means that the data must be made anonymous or destroyed as soon as the purpose is over. In the TeSLA environment, the data collected before, during and after the “at distance” examination must be made anonymous or destroyed after a certain time limit. This time will depend on the time needed to ensure that the right person has presented the exam without any unauthorized help during the whole examination.

In order to meet these three conditions, TeSLA will have to create privacy filters in order to reduce the invasion in the privacy of the participants. This is the work performed by the technical members of the consortium with the legal one (the Crids) in a “privacy by design process”.

By Jean-Marc Van Gyseghem, head of the Research Unit “Liberties and Information society” of the Crids-University of Namur and TeSLA project contributor.