Note

All features how to handle personal data, from annotations to Maven profiles are in experimental stage. For details what this means to you read the API documentation of the @Experimental annotation.

Note, that feedback on this feature set is very welcome.

Personal data needs to be handled carefully, as it can be subject to regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Therefore, it is important to know how and where personal data is used in your code.

CoreMedia provides annotations to mark personal data and document the flow of personal data in Java code. You can also enable compile-time checks to validate that personal data is not passed accidentally to methods or libraries that are not prepared for personal data. Compile-time checking can be enabled with a Maven profile as described in Section 4.4.7.1, “Running Personal Data Checker”.

CoreMedia public Java API and CoreMedia Blueprint code already use personal data annotations, especially in the context of Elastic Social. Note that applied annotations are not necessarily complete; there can be more places where personal data is used. The personal data annotations and the corresponding checker are tools to help to document and restrict access to personal data, but they cannot solve this for each and every case. The existing annotations also do not state whether some data is personal data in the sense of some legal act or regulation.

The annotations for personal data are:

of package com.coremedia.common.personaldata in module com.coremedia.cms:coremedia-personal-data. Please read the API documentation of that annotations first. It describes the usage of these annotations with examples in detail. Below you will find more details like Section 4.4.7.1, “Running Personal Data Checker”, Section 4.4.7.3, “Annotating Third-Party Libraries” and more.