Proposed revision: 15th March 2021

Description of the eduroam Service

eduroam (education roaming) is a secure, world-wide roaming access service developed for the international research and education community. eduroam allows any user from an eduroam participating site to get network access at any location that provides eduroam service.

The basic principle underpinning the security of eduroam is that the authentication of a user is carried out at his/her home institution (Identity Provider, IdP) using the institution’s specific authentication method. The authorisation required to allow access to local network resources is carried out by the visited institution (Service Provider, SP).

Thus the eduroam roaming consortium is comprised of many legal entities: (N)ROs, IdPs and SPs. (National) roaming operators ((N)RO)  are entities that operate the eduroam service for a country or economy and coordinate the activity of IdPs and SPs in the respective territory.

GÉANT is the body which is responsible for the international coordination and interoperability of eduroam. As such GÉANT operates a number of services for the eduroam community, from the technical infrastructure at the European level to supporting services aimed for the world-wide community.Those services are maintained by eduroam Operations Team (OT). This privacy policy concerns part of the eduroam service that is operated and maintained by GÉANT including, but not limited to, the following services:

• The European level authentication proxy infrastructure,
• The eduroam database, 
• The eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool (CAT) including support for eduroam Managed IdP and Managed SP Services,
• The eduroam F-ticks traffic measurement – a portal with technical information about the service,
• monitor.eduroam.org,
• The eduroam wiki and
• The eduroam website.

eduroam was designed for minimal disclosure of end users personal data following the requirement that user must be authenticated by his/hers IdP. The design of the system provides and favours the end user anonymization, i.e., the possibility to hide the end user’s identity from any third parties, including providers of eduroam network access (SPs). eduroam technical foundations have a built-in support for end user privacy throughout the authentication process. For all intermediate services, like routing of authentication requests and F-ticks (log format for distributed federations), the service is designed to know *nothing* about the actual identity of an end user, while still maintaining log traces which allow for resolving security incidents, debugging, monitoring and usage statistics.

To view the general Privacy Notice for GÉANT, please visit the GÉANT website.

Why We Process Personal Data

We process various data in order to provide a reliable and secure eduroam service and to ensure and improve the quality of the eduroam supporting service. The eduroam service is designed in a way that we don’t need to know end user identity in order to provide the service. Partners within eduroam community can anonymise potential end user’s private data.  We give advice and guidance to the community that recommends the highest levels of anonymity of data in all deployments.

We also collect data related to NROs, IdPS and SPs to enable supporting services and improve incident response and user support. Access to the data collected in the eduroam database and other supporting services which is considered private is limited (via authentication mechanism based on eduGAIN) to responsible personnel of GÉANT and NROs.

What Personal Data We Process

As part of the eduroam service, we process the following data:

• When you roam and visit other countries, the European proxy servers will receive and log the following data: your realm (denoting your institution and federation) and MAC addresses. We can also receive your username if  you have not chosen to anonymise this data. When you roam to another institution within your home country we don’t receive any data because the European proxy servers are not included in that process.  The service has a legitimate interest in processing this information.
• When you roam and visit other countries or other institutions within your federation we may also process for monitoring, measuring and reporting services, in addition to the data mentioned above, the data about visited country, visited institution and authentication outcome. The service has a legitimate interest in processing this information.
• As part of supporting activities we maintain several public web sites (e.g. web of CAT service) where  we collect normal web server logs, i.e. timestamp of access, IP address which requested the page, the page being requested, the HTML result code, etc. The data collected is for the purpose of troubleshooting and debugging potential problems of with eduroam web servers and therefore the service has a legitimate interest in processing this information.
• The eduroam Operational Team maintains a database where we collect data related to NROs, IdPS and SPs to enable supporting services and improve incident response and user support. The data is provided by the NROs based on the eduroam Policy.
• To ensure proper functioning of the eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool (CAT) and the related eduroam Managed IdP and Managed SP services, we collect the identifers and e-mail addresses of the NRO, IdP and SP admins responsible for the configurations that will be used be the end users. The service has a legitimate interest in processing this information.

Who Do We Share Data With?

Personal data gathered for website statistics is only shared within the GÉANT Association and the eduroam Operational Team for analysis and reporting..

The contact information collected in the eduroam database is used by the OT and NROs in order to resolve securty incident and debug problems reported by the end users.

All other personal data is held and processed only by the eduroam OT.  

Personal Data Retention

Analytical data for website statistics is currently retained permanently.

All data related to roaming are kept for a period of six months, unless a different requirement is set by legislation in individual European countries.

Security

We support the following processes to ensure the security of your data:

• Minimisation of personal data we collect;
• Managing, limiting and controlling access to personal data;
• Resilience of processing systems and services;
• Regular testing of the effectiveness of measures implemented.

Your Rights

You have the right to ensure:

• We process your data fairly and lawfully;
• Your data is accurate (to rectify data released by your home organisation, please contact directly);
• The data we collect is not excessive but only the data we require to provide the service;
• Your data is secure;
• Your personal data is securely destroyed when no longer required

You also have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, and to complain to the Supervisory Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens at https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl) about our data processing activities if you feel your data is not being managed as described here.

Contact Information