Skip to content

Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

joshuaselsky edited this page Apr 14, 2012 · 17 revisions

Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Introduction

This page describes the ohmage terms of service and privacy policy. It is a work-in-progress and will be updated as necessary. The contents of this page will be served up by registration/read and displayed during the self-registration process.

General Information

ohmage is an open source project developed at UCLA's CENS-MobilizeLabs research lab. ohmage is licensed under the [Apache 2.0 Software License] (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html). Anyone may fork our public GitHub projects. These policies reflect ohmage installs managed by the core ohmage team at CENS-MobilizeLabs.

Terms of Service

We will collect as much data as is required by our system and that you offer to our system, no more, no less. We will keep the data as secure as possible, but you recognize that unforeseeable incidents may happen that cause data to be lost or stolen. We make every effort to keep our systems as secure as possible.

Any website collects information about its users. This typically includes data about the device being used (for example, a web browser or a smartphone application), the IP address of the system making requests, HTTP cookies, request timestamps and timezones, and any data (including images) being provided to interact with the various application functions. In addition to the standard HTTP headers and payloads just described, ohmage also collects location information, system analytics regarding smartphone usage, personal data streams, and your email address, if provided. By using the ohmage smartphone application, you acknowledge that this information is being collected about you and your activities. If you are a software developer, the ohmage server APIs are fully documented on [GitHub] (https://github.com/cens/ohmageServer/wiki).

Why We Collect This Data

ohmage is designed for the analysis of scripted self-report (survey) data, smartphone analytics data, and personal data streams such as user activity data. All of these data streams can be combined together to provide useful information to end users, researchers, clinicians and students from a wide variety of application domains. If you are a participant in a study in a domain of research around health behaviors, you will be given a very thorough explanation about the study and the information collected. This process is handled by the IRB (Institutional Review Board) from various institutions. UCLA's IRB information can be found [here] (http://ohrpp.research.ucla.edu/pages/about-irb). Each research study has its own IRB application that is thoroughly vetted and approved by an IRB before the study can begin.

If you are a participant in a research study, you always have the option to opt-out and discontinue your participation.

Your Privacy

In cases where you have self-registered with ohmage, it is up to you to choose a username and password. You are also asked to provide your email address. We will only use your email address to contact you to complete the registration process and reset your password should it be necessary. CENS-MobilizeLabs does not share or sell your email address or personal information with any third-party.

In ohmage, you have control over the privacy settings of your self-report data. Each self-report may be marked as "shared" or "private". When a self-report is marked as private, only you, system administrators, and research supervisors can view that data. A research supervisor is a person who is managing a population of participants in order to perform research. As a participant, you may also delete your self-report responses.

For passively collected data such as smartphone analytics and personal data streams, the data is private to you, system administrators and research supervisors. This information is used to analyze self-report data along different axes. For example, your activity may be compared to your self-reports about sleep in a sleep study.

One of our goals is to put you in control of your data. It is also important for system administrators and research supervisors to have access to your data in order to interpret patterns, perform research, and fix system problems. The ohmage team will put your privacy first and we will never share your data with a third-party.

Final Notes

We are constantly striving to build a great software and a pleasing experience to our end users. We think our app is awesome and we hope you enjoy using it!