HydroShare Statement of Privacy
Last modified May 29, 2019
HydroShare is operated by a team of researchers associated with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) and funded by the National Science Foundation. The services are hosted at participating institutions including the Renaissance Computing Institute at University of North Carolina, Utah State University, Brigham Young University, Tufts, University of Virginia, University of Texas, Purdue and CUAHSI. In the following these are referred to as participating institutions.
We respect your privacy. We will only use your personal identification information to support and manage your use of hydroshare.org, including the use of tracking cookies to facilitate hydroshare.org security procedures. The HydroShare participating institutions and the National Science Foundation (which funds hydroshare.org development) regularly request hydroshare.org usages statistics and other information. Usage of hydroshare.org is monitored and usage statistics are collected and reported on a regular basis. Hydroshare.org also reserves the right to contact you to request additional information or to keep you updated on changes to Hydroshare.org. You may opt out of receiving newsletters and other non-essential communications. No information that would identify you personally will be provided to sponsors or third parties without your permission. We use 3rd party services such as Google Analytics and Heap Analytics to collect usage information and therefore information that does not personally identify you may be shared with these 3rd parties.
Passive Collection of Data
HydroShare collects and stores information that is generated automatically as you use it, including your preferences and anonymous usage statistics. This information may include Internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, the files viewed on our websites and applications (e.g., HTML pages, graphics, etc.), operating system, date/time stamp, and/or clickstream data. We use this data to analyze trends in the aggregate and administer our Products. Non-personal information that we passively collect may be combined with other information about you, including Personal Information. We use this information to facilitate and improve HydroShare.
Tracking Technologies
HydroShare uses cookies and similar technologies to analyze trends, track user's movements around the website, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. You can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level, but if you choose to disable cookies, it may limit your use of certain features or functions of our Products. Non-personal information that we collect using these technologies may be combined with other information about you, including Personal Information.
Accessibility of information posted in HydroShare
HydroShare uses policies and procedures to manage the access to content according to the access control settings set by users. All information posted or stored on hydroshare.org is potentially available to other users of hydroshare.org and the public. The HydroShare participating institutions and hydroshare.org disclaim any responsibility for the preservation of confidentiality of such information. Do not post or store information on hydroshare.org if you expect to or are obligated to protect the confidentiality of that information.
Profile Information
Profile information placed in HydroShare is public and potentially accessible to all HydroShare users. Do not add information to your profile that you want to keep private. We will strive to protect your email address by, for example only allowing registered users access to mailto links, but cannot guarantee that your email address will not be exposed.
Resources
The following information on resources is always public
- Unique identifier (GUID)
- Title
- Owners names and links to owners’ profile pages
- Resource type
The following additional resource metadata is accessible to users who have access to a resource by virtue of it being published, public, discoverable or directly shared with them at any level (view, edit, own). This includes:
- Authors (Dublin core creators)
- Contributors
- Creation date
- Last updated date
- Abstract
- Keywords (Dublin core subjects)
- Coverage (temporal and spatial)
- Related resources
- Resource metadata specific to the resource type that is presented on the resource specific tab of the landing page
Resource content files are accessible to users who have access to a resource by virtue of it being published, public or directly shared with them at any level (view, edit, own). Note that content files are protected for resources that are not discoverable. Content files include:
- OAI-ORE bagit files (bagit.txt, manifest-md5.txt, tagmanifest-md5.txt)
- Resource metadata XML files (resourcemap.xml, resource metadata.xml)
- Resource data contents in folder data/contents
- Resource visualization files in data/visualization (if present)
Note that since apps generally require access to resource content files, the “Open with” app functionality is only enabled for resources where the full content is accessible (not protected by being restricted to discoverable).