In this privacy policy, we want to help you understand how the Community Digital Library. ("CDL,” "we” or "us”) collects, uses, and shares information about you when you use our website and browser extension (collectively, the “Services”).

What Information Do We Collect?

Information You Provide to Us

We collect information that you provide to us while using our services.

• Account information.

  This includes your email, username, hashed password, and any account settings or information provided when you create or update an account.

• Content that you submit.

  This includes submissions (URL, title, highlighted text), communities (name, description, membership status), feedback and relevance judgments, note pages, and queries typed into the search bar.

• Actions that you take.

  This includes opening the extension on a specific webpage (webpage URL, webpage title, webpage description, and meta-tags), clicking search or recommendation results, and viewing a submission.

Information Collected Automatically

• Server logs and IP address.

  For security purposes, we record the IP address of each request set to our server.

How Do We Use Information?

• Provide, maintain, and improve the services.

  This includes keeping you logged in into the extension and website, measuring the performance of our search and recommendation models, and gathering insights to improve your user experience.

• Personalize search and recommendation results.

How Do We Share Information?

• With other users.

  Much of the information that we collect is available to you or to other members of your communities by design of the CDL. This includes the submission titles, descriptions, and URLs, and the community names and descriptions.

• With researchers (de-identified, and with consent).

  The long-term goal of the CDL is to research the information needs of individuals in specific contexts so that we can better resolve these needs. Thus, a significant component of the CDL is researching the usage patterns of users. If we perform research (beyond the use of improving the platform), then we will (1) ask for your consent, and (2) de-identify the data before analysis.

• No information is shared with third parties or advertisers.

How We Protect Information

• All requests are sent over HTTPS.

  Any time you send data to the CDL or receive data from the CDL, it is secured using HTTPS.

• The production databases are under access control.

  We restrict internal access to production data to minimize the likelihood of your data being accidently accessed or released from our databases.