Data Economy

Several efforts have been made to reduce the amount of data that EvaP stores and that is visible to users. Among those:

Data creation

• Rating answers are stored in an aggregated format and not individually (#584), so apart from the first voter (see #1335), there are no sequential IDs that help grouping the answers by voter.
• Comments have random IDs (#1002), otherwise the usually sequential IDs would enable grouping comments by voter.
• Random IDs have also been applied to rating answers (#1341), since it was previously possible to reconstruct the votes of the first couple voters (see #1335 for an explanation)
• (tbd) However, at the moment, it is still possible to reconstruct the author of votes with database access (#1384)

Data deletion

• Participations can be archived (#505), enabling participants to be deleted (bulk deletion: #749)
• Grade documents can be deleted in bulk for a semester (#1219)
• Results can be archived (#1219), making them invisible for all users except managers and the respective contributors
• When evaluation results are published, text answers that do not meet the threshold for publishing and hidden textanswers are deleted (#1188 (1) (2))

Data visibility

• The user group with the most rights (managers) can be kept very small by the introduction of a second group (reviewers), which can assist managers with reviewing comments (#920, #1230). Reviewers have limited edit rights and cannot see user profiles and archived results.
• (tbd) We plan to make staff users explicitly enable the "Staff mode" to use their additional viewing and editing rights (#1109)
• External users can only see their own courses (#1085)
• Courses marked as private can only be seen by their contributors, participants, and staff users (#807)
• Results are shown to different user groups only when certain thresholds are met, see Publishing-Results