Privacy Policy

Information that we collect from you

We collect information about you: when you provide us with your personal details (such as your name, contact details, e-mail address etc) by submitting an inquiry via the Site or registering with us; when you respond to surveys which we ask you to complete for research purposes; and from your usage of the Site and any other information you post on the site, e-mail or otherwise sent to us.

Use of your information

We use your information: to enable us to supply you with information which you have requested; to analyse the information we collect so that we can administer, support and improve and develop the Site; to provide you with information that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes; to notify you about changes to our service. We may contact you by e-mail. If you change your mind about being contacted in the future then please let us know.

If you register with an e-mail address and a password, we send that address one message, from operationsacademia@gmail.com, with a link that confirms the address is yours. The account cannot be used until the link is clicked, and the message is sent again only when you ask for it. Registering with Google needs no such message, because Google has already confirmed the address.

If you post a job through the Site, we e-mail the address you give us once, when your posting becomes publicly shown, with the posting as it appears and a link to it. That message is about your own submission rather than a subscription, so there is nothing to unsubscribe from; it is sent once per posting and never again. The contact details on a posting — your name and address, and any area coordinator or department chair you name — are shown to the site’s maintainer only and are never published on the Site or included in any file it serves.

Storage of your information

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of the Site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone. Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will use our reasonable endeavours to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to the Site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

Disclosure of your information

The Researcher is able to access the information you provide to us. Unless required or permitted to do so by law, we will not otherwise share, sell or distribute any of the information you provide to us without your consent.

IP addresses

We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type. This information is statistical data about users’ browsing actions and patterns, it does not identify any individual. It is used to inform improvements to the website, for system administration, and to report aggregate information to third parties.

Google Analytics, and why this Site sets no analytics cookies

We use Google Analytics 4, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”), to understand how the Site is used. Information about your visit — the pages you open, roughly where in the world you are, and your browser and device type — is sent to Google and is subject to Google’s Privacy Policy. Google truncates IP addresses before storing them.

It is configured to store nothing at all on your device. Google Analytics normally writes a cookie so that it can recognise you when you come back; we switch that off (client_storage: ‘none’), so no analytics cookie, and no other analytics identifier, is ever written to your browser by this Site. That is why you are not asked to accept cookies when you arrive: there are none to accept. The trade-off is ours rather than yours — without an identifier we cannot tell a returning reader from a new one, so our own visitor numbers are approximate.

We have also turned off Google Signals and advertising personalisation, so nothing collected here is used to build advertising audiences or to follow you across devices or other websites. We do not run advertising on this Site and we do not sell or share this information.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, or the older “Do Not Track” signal, Google Analytics is not loaded at all on your visit — not merely asked to behave, but never contacted.

Which universities read the Site

The Site publishes a chart of the universities its readers come from, on its Analytics page. It is worked out like this: once per browsing session your browser sends us a request carrying no name, no identifier, no cookie and no message of any kind. Our server looks at the network address that request arrived from and asks the public directory of the internet what that network is called — the same look-up an e-mail server or a web log performs. If the answer is a university we list a department for, we add one to that university’s count for the day.

Your address is never stored. It is used for that one look-up, in memory, and is gone when the request ends; it is not written to any file or database and it is not written to any log. What we keep is a daily tally — how many visits there were, how many could be placed, and a number against each university. There is no record of an individual visit and nothing that could be traced back to you.

If your network turns out to belong to a company, an internet provider or a mobile operator rather than a university, nothing at all is recorded — not the address, and not the name of the provider. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or “Do Not Track” signal, no request is sent in the first place.

We additionally record basic usage of the Site — the pages you visit, the time you spend on them, the links and buttons you click, and which form fields you interact with (never the text you type into them). When you are signed in to an Operations Academia account this is linked to your account; otherwise it is linked only to a random identifier stored in your browser. This information is used solely by the Site’s maintainer to understand how the Site is used and to improve it; it is never published, shared with third parties, or used for advertising. From the same record the Site keeps a count of how often each candidate profile was opened and its CV clicked, which is shown only to that candidate (and to the maintainer) and never to anyone else. You can request a copy or the deletion of this information at any time by contacting us.

When you hold an Operations Academia account we keep a short record of it so that the Site’s maintainer can see who has registered and get in touch: the name you show yourself under, the e-mail address you sign in with, the affiliation you gave on your profile, and when your account was first and last seen. If you sign in with a provider that shares no e-mail address with us — ORCID does not — the Site asks you for one instead, and keeps that; it is how the maintainer reaches you and it is not a way to sign in. If you connect a Google or ORCID sign-in to your account, on the card that follows registration or from Edit account, the account records that sign-in so that you can use it to sign in, and for ORCID the iD it proved; the iD is used to recognise the same person behind two registrations and to offer to merge them, and for nothing else. Where any of these is missing, the Site asks you for it: an account that signs in with Google or ORCID alone is asked before it can use the Site, and an account with a password is asked the first time you open it in a browsing session; either way the asking stops once you have answered. It is readable by the maintainer alone — never by other users, never by the public, and it is never published on the Site or shared with third parties. The one thing about registered accounts that is public is how many there are: the Site shows the number of registered users, and how that number has grown over time, and nothing about who they are. The maintainer may use it to send you a message, which appears in your own area on the Site under “Messages” and which you can reply to there; those messages are private to the two of you. You may delete the whole account, and everything above with it, at any time and without asking anyone (see “Deleting your account” below). You may remove any single message from your own list of them at any time, and put it back again afterwards; removing changes only what is shown to you — the message remains part of the conversation and the maintainer keeps their copy of it, so that neither side can rewrite what was said. You can request a copy or the deletion of any of this at any time by contacting us.

Deleting your account

You can delete your Operations Academia account yourself, at any time and without asking anyone: sign in, open your personal area, and use Delete my account at the foot of the page. You are told what the account holds before you confirm it, and you have to type the word DELETE, because it cannot be undone.

Deleting an account removes everything that is kept against it. The job postings, candidate profile and placement reports you filed come off the site; your e-mail alerts stop; your name, your affiliation, your photograph and the rest of your details are removed; the conversation between you and the site’s maintainer under “Messages” is deleted, on both sides; the record of how you used the site is deleted; a job advertisement or CV you uploaded is deleted, including the copy of it kept in the maintainer’s Google Drive; and your sign-in is removed, so the address and password no longer open anything. Most of it happens the moment you press the button, the rest within a few minutes once the site has rebuilt the pages your postings were on, and the last of it within the hour. What we keep afterwards is the date the account was deleted and how many things came off the site with it, and nothing that says who you were.

Removing a single message from your list, described above, is a different thing: that message stays in the conversation and the maintainer keeps their copy of it. Deleting your account removes the conversation itself, on both sides.

Two things are deliberately not removed, and it is fairer to say so than to claim otherwise. Anything you sent through the feedback form is not linked to your account (that form can be used without signing in at all), so it stays with the maintainer; write to us if you would like it taken out too. And a correction you contributed to the Universities directory stays, because other people rely on it, but your name is removed from it, so the card says it was last edited by a registered user instead.

The site’s maintainer can also delete an account, and it removes exactly the same things. Your own deletion begins the moment you press the button; one the maintainer asks for starts within a couple of minutes.

The forum

The Site has an anonymous forum in two rooms: a Candidates’ room for the accounts holding a candidate profile for the season under way, and an Open forum for every registered account whose e-mail address is confirmed. You post there under a handle, and the handle is random: two words and a number drawn by chance when you first join in a season, the same in both rooms, and changed at the July roll. The Site links a handle to an account only through a keyed one-way hash computed inside its server functions, whose key is destroyed a month after the season ends; after that nobody, the maintainer included, can tell which account held which handle in that season. The forum does not read the address your browser connects from, stores no record of it and does not load the analytics and visit measurements the rest of the Site carries. Google’s own request logs for the server functions record the connecting address and the minute of each call for their standard retention; only the maintainer’s project login can read them, and the forum writes nothing of its own to them. Every time a post or a vote is stored is rounded down to the minute. The maintainer can read and post in both rooms as an ordinary member under a handle like anyone else’s, and moderates them; linking a current-season handle to a person would take a deliberate step with the key and never happens by accident.

Security

We employ security measures to protect your information from access by unauthorised persons and against unlawful processing, accidental loss, destruction or damage, (although no warranties can be given in such regard).

Changes to our Privacy Policy

We may amend this policy from time to time. If we make any substantial changes we will notify you by posting a prominent notice on the Site.

Your rights

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information held by us in our records in return for which we charge a small fee. The Site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Contact us

If you have any queries concerning your personal information or any questions on our use of the information then please contact us.