That said, it is our policy that the privacy of all users will be respected and protected. The BI Wizard software is designed to help you develop a broader impact statement that will satisfy NSF Criterion II and fulfill your interest in communicating your science. Personally identifiable information connected to an individual's account is considered confidential. This information includes, but is not limited to, log-in information, text entered by the user, and downloads of content managed by the COSEE NOW. However, to improve upon the software, COSEE NOW staff may analyze and use information that can not be considered 'personally identifiable'. Your information will not be made available to other users or outside groups or sold to any commercial vendors. You are encouraged to share your individual information with potential partners, however COSEE NOW is not responsible for information transmitted during communications outside of the software.
An email address is required to create an account and save your work to the BI Wizard site, but it is not shown publicly or shared with those outside of the COSEE NOW staff. In addition to acting as a username for your account, which will allow us to archive your data, your email address may be used to send you notifications on updates to the software.
Like most web sites, we track general usage of the site, by account holders and guests 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.
Because COSEE NOW is a NSF funded research project, we are very interested in studying how our community uses our software and how we can improve the utility of the program. To do so, we may occasionally collect information the users' interactions with the BI Wizard services, including but not limited to user selections for audiences and budget information. We will not associate names or e-mail addresses with this information in any way and will not report this information in ways that connect back to individual users. Instead, any report will present information with anonymous aggregated usage statistics. 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.