Privacy Policy

This site is built on the DERIVA data management platform developed by the University of Southern California. DERIVA and its applications may gather information about you and your use of the platform in order to improve your user experience and provide certain functionality. This policy provides information on how information is collected and used by systems built on the DERIVA platform. Additional policies may apply for specific DERIVA deployments.

Types Of Information Collected

Personal Information

When interacting with DERIVA, use of certain features may require you to register or sign in using an account managed by a third party identity provider such as Google, ORCHID, or Globus. As part of the registration process, we may ask for and store personally identifying information such as your name, a verifiable email address, or phone number.

In addition, you may be required to provide additional Personal Information, such as your real name, a phone number, and an address, when joining certain groups, depending on the policies set by that group’s administrators.

Usage Data

When using DERIVA, we may track and store details about your interactions, including what records are searched and viewed, what data downloaded, time spent on each page, and the user interface functions used. This information may include personal information. Information may be collected via tools run within a web browser, or tools provided by USC that you download and run from computers you own.

Usage data may be stored by a third party provider such as Google Analytics. In this case, no personally identifying information will be included with the usage data.

Data and Metadata

In order to deliver data management services, DERIVA-based platforms may store information about data (metadata), or the data itself. This data may be located in a third party storage provider (e.g. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure). In these cases, data will be managed using best practice access control and security and access will not be provided to the storage provider.

Use of Data

Data is collected in order to improve your user experience and the overall function of the DERIVA software.

Personalization of Features

Data collected may be used to personalize your user experience based on your actions. Data may also be aggregated with other data to improve the experience of other users of a DERIVA-based system without including any personally identifiable information.

System Improvement

Data collected about your interactions with DERIVA-based systems may be used by the DERIVA developers to improve the design and implementation of DERIVA functions, or to evaluate and test new DERIVA features.

Marketing

We may use personal information to notify you of system updates and status. In addition, information about system usage may be provided to the sponsor to the DERIVA site, who may use this information to contact you with regards to assessing the system utility and usage.

Cookies for Usage Data

We use cookies to track how visitors use this application and to provide some of its functionality. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your machine to help the DERIVA system provide a better user experience. In general, cookies are used to retain user preferences, store information for things like shopping carts, and provide anonymized tracking data to third party applications, like Google Analytics.

You may disable any cookies already stored on your computer, but this may interfere with this application's usability.

Sharing of Information

Sharing with Other Users

DERIVA may allow you to collaborate with other users by sharing usage data. Such sharing will only be done with explicit permission from a user.

Sharing with Deployment Sponsors

In some situations, we may share personalized information with the sponsor of a site. Notice will be provided if sharing of this information with a sponsor is a condition of use.

Data Retention

Usage data collected by our applications may be retained indefinitely.

Data and Metadata stored within a DERIVA system may be stored even after deletion for purposes of backup and recovery for a period to time that will be stated for each DERIVA deployment.

Mode of Processing the Data

USC shall take appropriate security measures to prevent unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or unauthorized destruction of the data. In addition to USC, in some cases, the data may be accessible to certain types of persons in charge, involved with the operation of the site (administration, legal, system administration) or external parties (such as third party technical service providers, mail carriers, hosting providers, IT companies, or communications agencies).

Third-Party Sites

The Services may include links to other websites and storage providers. You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party sites. This Privacy Policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other websites.