⚠️Privacy and Terms Of Service

We will not make your uploaded sequence data or associated metadata available to other users or collaborators, or use it in our own internal analyses, without explicit consent.

Privacy

'This statement explains how the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (“CGPS”) uses the personal information we collect from you when you visit Pathogenwatch website. By visiting Pathogenwatch website you are consenting to our use of your information in this way.

We may make changes to this statement so please check from time to time for any updates.

Information about you we may collect and use

Pathogenwatch accesses your name and email when signing in with Google, Apple, Microsoft or CLIMB as an authentication provider. Other information (such as your profile photo) is not accessed, collected or stored by Pathogenwatch. The same policy will be applied if other providers are added to the list. Pathogenwatch stores email addresses only when creating an account with direct email-based login.

When you visit Pathogenwatch, we collect certain technical information from your device including Page URL, HTTP Referrer, Browser, Operating system, Device type, and your location (Country).

We do not track anything more granular than country level and the IP address of the visitor is discarded. We never store IP addresses in our database or logs.

How we use your information

We display the information you give us (your name and email) in your account page. We may use your email to contact you about changes to your user account, the service, the Terms of Service, or other related purposes.

Cookies

When you visit Pathogenwatch we use cookies to automatically collect information about how you use our sites. Please see our Cookies information (below).

Sharing your information

We do not share your personal information with any organisation. Your name and email are not displayed to other Pathogenwatch users.

We use an open-source web analytics tool to capture privacy friendly analytics which we store on our servers. Your data is not sent to, shared with, or sold to any third-parties.

Personal Data and Your Responsibilities

The CGPS is based in the UK and operate under the The Data Protection Act 2018, the UK’s implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You may be in a different legal jurisdiction so must ensure that you follow UK GDPR as well as your own local laws. For more information on UK GDPR please see Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

When you use Pathogenwatch, CGPS is the Data Processor and you are the Data Controller, as you have control over the data you collect and CGPS only acts on your instructions.

Publication of Data

If you make a Pathogenwatch collection public, ALL data within Pathogenwatch will be visible to anyone on the internet. Please ensure that you are not breaking any Data Protections laws that may apply. CGPS cannot be held responsible for data published by users.

Reasonable Use and Data Retention

The service is provided at no cost to you, however we incur costs for managing and processing the data. We reserve the right to delete excessively large or dormant data sets after a period of time, however we will attempt to contact you by email before doing so.

Protecting Your Data

Pathogenwatch is part of the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford (https://www.bdi.ox.ac.uk) and hosted on DigitalOcean (a world-class cloud provider). DigitalOcean services comply with GDPR (https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/gdpr​), you can find more about DigitalOcean data security on: ​https://www.digitalocean.com/legal​

Pathogenwatch embraces industry-standard best practices to protect against unauthorised access of your data. Data is sent over HTTPS protocol and its TLS certificate uses SHA-256 with RSA encryption as a signature algorithm.

Sharing your information

The CGPS does not share your personal information with any external organisation. Your name and email are not displayed to other Pathogenwatch users. We use an open-source web analytics tool to capture privacy friendly analytics which we store on our servers. Your data is not sent to, shared with, or sold to any third-parties.

Data Deletion

If (1) you believe that personal information of yours has been incorrectly uploaded associated to our service, for instance an email address in the description of a collection, or in the metadata of an assembly, or (2) would like to delete an account or any other uploaded assembly or metadata, then contact us via [email protected].

Terms Of Service

Pathogenwatch is provided specifically for the analysis of microbial genome data and associated phenotype and environmental data, and no other purpose.

You must ensure that you are in full compliance with all applicable data protection laws when uploading genome sequences and associated information, and necessary consents given.

We will not share your private collection information, or process it in anyway beyond what is required to provide Pathogenwatch.

Cookies

Like most websites, Pathogenwatch uses cookies to enable key functionality, including authentication (logging in), along with some management of local state (e.g. selected genomes). A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we save to your computer or device if you agree. We do not use any tracking cookies anymore.

A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we save to your computer or device if you agree. By signing in, you agree to that we save the following cookies to your computer or device.

Details of cookie usage on the Pathogenwatch website

Type	Name	Purpose	Duration
Your visit	connect.sid	Authentication cookie.	Session cookie

Third-party cookies

Pathogenwatch does not use third party cookies.

Contact us

If you have any additional questions or you would like to a submit a data subject access request, please contact us by filling out this form: https://forms.clickup.com/26483244/f/t86hc-5287/GPMM9RGVFL00LABGLN.