As part of our reports to funding bodies, we use google analytics to collect traffic data to the webserver. For example, google analytics records data about how users found protein-sol, what parts of the webserver they visit, how long they spend on particular pages etc. For this to work, google analytics records IP addresses. To ensure maximum privacy, we have opted to only record anonymised IP addresses, this still provides us with some information about what part of the world you are coming from, and your behaviour on the site, but it doesn’t allow us to identify you in any way from the data.
The data collected by google analytics is only available to three members of the protein-sol team at the University of Manchester. Data is only used to present statistics such as number of visitors, how many countries, and total number of pageviews. This data will be shared with funding bodies during grant applications and reports, but will contain no personally identifying information whatsoever.
All google analytics traffic data is retained for 14 months, which is the shortest amount of time available.
We also record the number of times each app is run every day, but this is simply a sum of incidences, with no other information recorded.
Uploaded sequences or structures are never investigated or opened and are deleted from protein-sol entirely after 1 week, during which the user can share their results with the custom URL.
We are committed to making protein-sol a free server, available without licensing or registration, and therefore, we collect no email addresses, usernames, passwords, or any other pseudonymous identifies. All of our job id numbers are generated using a cryptographically secure pseudo-random byte algorithm based on this source, which is 10 bytes long. This should prevent any brute force guessing of the job id.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at protein-sol@manchester.ac.uk.