Globalization meets GDPR: implementing privacy safe transactions in modern APIs using personal data

Abstract

Digital transformation of higher education is bringing enormous benefit. Advances in technology and the development of open standards mean that a seamless ‘plug and play’ learning ecosystem is now a reality. Seamless interoperability, for all its advantages, has so far come with certain risks. How can we be absolutely sure that all of our transactions are fully compliant with strict privacy laws? To date, the only way to achieve this has been to make those transactions less efficient than they could otherwise be. In this paper we show how the work of the European 1EdTech community is ensuring that European public values influence global innovation. We discuss a set of data privacy principles that the community has developed and see how these are being implemented in practice in the Edu-API standard.