Data Protection and Privacy

Who manages the data?

The PIs, executive board, and software developers behind CoMSES Net, the Network for Computational Modeling in the Social and Ecological sciences value your privacy and take security issues seriously. We are an open-source volunteer-driven community but we also have paid staff who are responsible for ensuring the security and privacy of your data.

What information is collected when you visit this site?

When you visit this site we track:

  • IP addresses
    - pseudo-anonymized via Google Analytics
    - in HTTP server logs to help us handle Denial of Service and other brute force hacks via fail2ban
    - when a codebase release is downloaded to help us disambiguate bots from real users
  • Site content which includes:
    - Posting a job or event
    - Archiving a codebase / codebase release
    - Posting comments in our forum

What do we do with this information?

  • track user engagement to help us improve our website layout and organization of content
  • summarize jobs, events, published computational models, and other content for the comses digest
  • provide aggregate statistics for reports and grant proposals to funding agencies
  • provide a (hopefully!) useful service to the computational modeling community

Disclosure to Third Parties

We use Google Analytics.

How does CoMSES secure your data?

  • User passwords are salted and encrypted using Django’s password management algorithms but you should consider making your password unusable and using social auth exclusively.
  • All web resources are only accessible over https
  • We patch and update our systems as soon as possible when security vulnerabilities in our technology stack are reported. We monitor CVEs, security mailing lists, and use snyk.io to help us keep our dependencies up to date.

Use of Cookies

Cookies are used on this website for authentication as well as tracking page views and downloads. You may opt out of Google Analytics tracking with a browser addon.

What personal information is stored on our site?

Personal information is only stored on our site if you or someone else enters it. Personally entered information in your user profile can be deleted from the website at any time by editing your user profile. If someone else has entered sensitive information about you on our website and you would like it removed please contact us.

This website uses cookies and Google Analytics to help us track user engagement and improve our site. If you'd like to know more information about what data we collect and why, please see our data privacy policy. If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies.
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