Account or data transfer

If a user changing institutions, departments or otherwise employers and receives a new account with GWDG a transfer of data from one account to another in the services ShareLaTeX/Overleaf, Rocket.Chat and Jupyter-Cloud is not performed.

A transfer or merging of accounts is against the idea of assigning a new user account to a person changing affiliations, such as moving from one institute to another, especially when changing employees.

The reasoning is that discontinuing and ultimately deactivating an old account of a former member or employee of an institution is a means of controlling access to the resources and information by the former institute or employer of the account holder. It must be assumed that they expect access to information and resources ceases with invalidation of the old account. If GWDG, as a provider of the services and account management, was to rename users in these services to associate them with their new accounts then GWDG would circumvent this measure of control without knowledge of the former account issuer. Therefore the decision was made to not allow account renames or data transfers in services.

However, it is also understood that with permission from the former account issuer regarding this the concern would be alleviated and users changing affiliations or employers would be spared the inconvenience of setting up new accounts or manually move data. GWDG is working to establishing a process that allows former account issuers to give permission to data transfers or account changes of former employees formally. However, this process doesn't yet exists.

This policy was decided with regard to data security and GWDG's role as a service *and* identity provider to multiple parties.