Although the Article 29 Working Party seem to have had applications such as incident response in mind when drafting their guidance on exports, that guidance could also be helpful in the field of federated authentication.

The European Council of Ministers have now published a proposed text for the General Data Protection Regulation. This still needs to be edited by the Commission's "lawyer-linguists" to check for inconsistencies, sort out the numbering of recitals and articles etc. But the working parties of both the Parliament and the Council have recommended that the resulting text should be adopted by the respective full bodies at meetings in the next couple of months.

A question that comes up from time to time when discussing federated access management is "how can I rely on another organisation to manage accounts for me?". Federation saves services the trouble of managing user accounts by instead delegating the job to an external identity provider, but it's entirely reasonable to think carefully about that. Why should any service trust someone else to manage the keys to its valuable content?

Last week the European Commission published their proposed new Data Protection legislation. This will now be discussed and probably amended by the European Parliament and Council of Ministers before it becomes law, a process that most commentators expect to take at least two years. There's a lot in the proposal so this post will just cover the general themes.

It’s often said that technical people are bad at designing user interfaces. Ken Klingenstein’s presentation at the TERENA Networking Conference reported (and demonstrated) the results when user interface experts looked at the problem of explaining federated login to users.