We respect your privacy.
That said, please keep in mind that the COSEE NOW site is designed to foster communication and collaboration among the ocean science education community. To achieve this aim, most of the content contributed to our site is publicly available, including most comments posted to our network of companion blogs and workgroups. Therefore, as a general rule please do not contribute any information that you wish to keep private. A few areas of the site, including groups designated as “private” and the private messaging feature, are not publicly available, but please use your discretion when using these features.
An email address is required to join the COSEE NOW site, but it is not shown publicly. Your email address is used to send you:
- automatic notifications of new workgroup activity and other site notices (including forum comments, recent uploads, friendship requests, etc.). You can change your notification settings on your profile page.
- private messages from other site members with whom you have established a “Friend” connection.
- updates from the COSEE NOW team advising you of new COSEE NOW resources or upcoming events you may be interested in.
- invitations to participate in surveys to help us improve our site and evaluate our efforts for NSF.
Member Profiles
Currently, all information posted to your member profile (other than your email address) is publicly available. We currently require your name, position, profession, affiliation and affiliation type, which helps us measure the audiences we are reaching. Any additional fields you choose to fill out are voluntary, but will help other members find and connect with you.
We are currently looking into adding new features that will allow members to manage the privacy of their profile.
Statistics Tracking
Like most web sites, we track general usage of the site, by members and non-members alike. To do this we record all requests (“hits”) to the site, along with the requester’s IP address, browser information, referring page, the search terms used to find us, and other common information found in our Apache logs and Google Analytics. All of this data is collected anonymously. We use this information to help us determine how our site is used and to improve our site for our users. We occasionally use this data in presentations and reports, however we never link this data to any personal accounts or information.
Evaluation
Because COSEE NOW is a NSF funded research project, we are very interested in studying how our community is connected and how members interact, and ways we can improve both of these. To do so, we often analyze the publicly available information on this site (including profile data, friendship connections, group memberships, comment counts, and the text content of comments and blog posts) to better understand the growth of our community and the topics they are discussing. In general, we will not use information that is not publicly available in our reports, but most content on the site is currently public. In the future, if we add options to make information more private, we will not report this information in ways that connect back to individual users, and will instead preset information in anonymized aggregate forms.
If you have a question, or if you do not agree with these terms and would like your account to be deleted, suspended or hidden, please contact us.
Revised September 28, 2010