GDPR made searchable by Algolia | Hacker News Reader

GDPR made searchable by Algolia

gdpr.algolia.com

158 pointsvvoyer22 comments

If you want the law in a machine-readable format (YAML / JSON), we open-sourced our GDPR portal which includes parsers and raw data for the entire law as well as all recitals and footnotes in German as well as English:

https://github.com/DPKit/gdpr-portal

The website itself is available here:

https://gdpr.dpkit.com (EN) https://dsgvo.dpkit.com (DE) (works well on mobile too)

This is a work-in-progress, please let us know if you have any questions.

This is great and would be even better if it included the official adopted guidance from the working groups. For example, this is a very useful document:

http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/item-detail.cfm?item_...

This is nice. Though it’s worth pointing out to UX folks that flags are not languages.

http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...

Oh, darn. I read the domain name and thought it'd be a discussion about how forcing users to memorize two-hundred command-line switches is an extremely poor substitute for an actual domain-specific language. ;)

Particularly when the wrong flag is used. In this case, Gaelige is given the Scottish flag when it's actually the official language of Ireland in the EU. Scots and Irish Gaelige are not the same language. And Scotland is not an EU member (it's membership, sadly, is by virtue of the UK's membership)

Although I agree flags are not languages in the case of English different variants are recognized, so if you used an American Flag as your language indicator I would expect I would see a site written in EN-US and would only be confused if color were written as colour.

Not sure if Algolia doesn't generally work on mobile but this page is unusable on my Galaxy S8 in Chrome. See https://imgur.com/a/SEP6qdo

Same on iOS. It’s unusable.

Yeah that's what it looks like on Android Firefox too. Algolia powers HN search and it's always worked fine for me.

Thanks for sharing! Responsive design fixes are on their ways.

This makes me wonder how Algolia deals with GDPR.

For instance, if a user requests their data to be removed, how fast can this be reflected in Algolia's indices, and in the instant-search?

Indexing is an asynchronous process so while the data won't be deleted as soon as the deletion API call returns, the data will be deleted shortly after. Usually we're talking about hundreds of milliseconds or a few seconds. This is pretty much the same for all search-engines.

Algolia also exposes a "task" API endpoint to check the state of an indexing operation and to be able to "wait" until the operation has actually been processed. This is for instance what is used in unit tests where we need to wait until the indexing operation has been processed to continue testing.

Then for GDPR; if one of Algolia's customers receives a "personal data deletion" request on their side, it's of course their responsibility to forward it to Algolia using the deletion API (and a few seconds later it will be removed from all indices).

And for an encore: Does Algolia have a data processing agreement in place with HN?

You would need to ask YC to disclose this. They have a dpa ready to sign.

I went in and searched for children, so I can see there is not even English language stemming going on - which I mean that is the most common language to find a stemmer from in my experience.

I used to work for Thomson Reuters on their legal services products and while it is nice seeing something like this outside of a paid for service it's not that impressive. Maybe I'm jaded but from the comments here I was expecting to say 'wow, that is cool' and not immediately find that stemming didn't work.

on edit: fixed misspelling, formatting

Great work! UK charity The Society for Computers and Law is running a hackathon with the ICO in June in case anyone is interested in helping bring more tech to GDPR. Details at https://www.scl.org

Sorry full link : https://www.scl.org/events/525-scl-data-protection-hackathon...

This:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

Also has a search function and is a bit closer to the horses mouth.

This is great! I love how it automatically pulls full definitions for terms from the relevant "Article 4. Definitions" section and surfaces them throughout the text. I would love to see more legislation made available in this easy to understand format!

The presentation here is the most user friendly I have encountered so far: https://gdpr-info.eu/

This is awesome. Any chance algolia can make the whole of American Jurisprudence searchable? :D

Is the code for this website opensourced?

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