The following are files associated to an ongoing Safe Harbor request for access to personal data held by the company Coursera. These requests are separate from a much older ongoing arbitration procedure, which is covered by confidentiality conditions. In contrast, I can freely talk about the requests here.
Interestingly, Coursera happily claims that instructors have no special data protection rights, even though they signed clear Terms of Services when creating accounts on the platform. This most likely makes it illegal for Coursera to conduct business in any European country (or region) where partner universities are located.
There are in fact for separate original requests, due to my Belgian nationality and Swiss residency, offering two different relevantframeworks, and my dual use of the platform as an instructor and a student.
I have chosen to formulate my original requests as four separate emails:
- 2015-11-24-CH_instructor_request.txt
- 2015-11-24-EU_instructor_request.txt
- 2015-11-24-CH_student_request.txt
- 2015-11-24-EU_student_request.txt
Since the variations are minor between the EU and the Swiss Safe Harbor frameworks, I have also decided to include a consolidated version, only for information purposes (this was never sent!):
The curly braces {} are used to indicate the variations.
Coursera responded in 2016-01-04-Coursera_response.pdf. I was rather doubtful of the legality of some of the arguments advanced by Coursera on the matter, so I filed several complaints with local Data Protection Authorities. Coursera expanded on their initial reply later, by including:
The data presented here has served in research on artifacts of USB keyboards for keystroke biometrics.