The Right to Be Forgotten and Educational Data Mining: Challenges and Paths Forward

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union contains directions on how user data may be collected, stored, and when it must be deleted. As similar legislation is developed around the globe, there is the potential for repercussions across multiple fields of research, including educational data mining (EDM). Over the past two decades, the EDM community has taken consistent steps to protect learner privacy within our research, whilst pursuing goals that will benefit their learning. However, recent privacy legislation may cause our practices to need to change. The right to be forgotten states that users have the right to request that all their data (including deidentified data generated by them) be removed. In this paper, we discuss the potential challenges of this legislation for EDM research, including impacts on Open Science practices, data modeling, and data sharing. We also consider changes to EDM best practices that may aid compliance with this new legislation. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630829.]