Tracked changes and GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union at the end of May. This required us to release a new version of Fidus Writer (3.4) that makes it possible to run the website in a GDPR-compliant manner.

Tracked changes

Unfortunately, the main new feature we have been working on over the past half year, tracked changes, did not get finished in time. Stability is top priority for us, so Tracked Changes will have to wait until the next release of Fidus Writer.

A proposal for tracked changes

At this stage, tracked changes is feature complete for it’s first release, but we still need to do a lot more testing before we can release it. There is now a temporary server set up at https://staging.fiduswriter.org (login: testtest pw: testtest) to test the current state of the track changes feature. Tracking changes is a major new feature that is not easily done, so it will likely take quite a while before it stabilizes. Please do not put any valuable documents on this server! There is no backup and all information on the server will be deleted periodically.

I am interested in whether this is the kind of tracked changes you would be interested in. They work fairly similar to how tracked changes work in popular word processors. It is both possible to turn on tracked changes for the entire document and to only give the right to do make editions to the document that are tracked.

The staging server is running on a Hetzner Online GmbH -owned server in Nürnberg, Germany.

If you have ideas about tracked changes and how it should work, feel free to give your views in our forum.

Fidus Writer 3.4 (GDPR release)

There are also a number of minor changes in this update — such as the ability to put comments on parts of the contents of footnotes and a clearer way of contacting the developers to let us know about bugs. You can see the entire list of changes in the changelog.

We ourselves have not officially offered Fidus Writer hosted services thus far, but some power users who have tried our test server have convinced us that we probably should in the near future. We have removed the notice from the test server that data may disappear and turned on basic backup for that server.

We are complying with all relevant laws and regulations, including GDPR, with the test server, using services from Hetzner Online GmbH and their cloud services in Helsinki, Finland as well as the Amazon AWS cloud in Ireland. Both companies have signed Data Processing Agreements (DPA) with Lund Info AB, the company behind Fidus Writer. Where we store customer data may change in the future, depending on what services are available. However, what we can promise is that none of the data entered into our system at app.fiduswriter.org will be used for marketing purposes or similar. And we will always have the user data hosted within the European Economic Area (EEA) which has some of the world’s strongest privacy laws.

For details, look at the updated terms and conditions and privacy policy for our test server.

We will do our best to not lose any customer data, but until we roll hosted service out as a self-financing service, the main responsibility for the data on the server is still with you.

 

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