Merchants embed InAcademia into their processes that validate whether users are eligible for specified offers. The Merchant service initiates an OIDC request towards InAcademia asking the InAcademia service to compare the a specified affiliation, such as ‘student’, ‘faculty’, ‘staff’ or ‘employee’ with the user’s actual affiliation. InAcademia then creates a SAML request towards the related Identity Provider.Users are asked to authenticate and are asked to consent to InAcademia sharing their academic affiliation with the relevant service. InAcademia then returns a response that compares the requested and actual affiliation, and discards any additional attributes in such a way that preserves the user’s privacy and minimises the exchange of personal information that would otherwise be necessary for the user to share. See https://inacademia.org/inacademia-and-privacy/ for more information.
