CoralNet's Privacy Policy

Disclaimer: This is not intended to serve as a legal document. This page informally describes the extent that various data on the website are considered private or not. We CoralNet administrators implement, follow, update, and communicate this policy with a best effort. We do this with the motivations of treating research communities with respect and providing a service that people will want to use. However, we do not have the resources or legal framework to make formal guarantees about keeping private data private. Your usage of this website is at your own risk.

We at CoralNet highly encourage public sharing of research data for the greater good. However, we realize that data privacy is preferred in some cases, especially for newer projects. So, sources have two visibility options, Public or Private.

Public sources

  • All of your source's images and annotation data are available for the public to browse and download (including original images in full resolution).

  • Only members of the source can add or edit content.

Private sources

  • All users can still see your source on the world map, based on the source's latitude and longitude settings. Here, they can also see the name, description, affiliation, and total number of images in your source - but no example images.

  • Label information pages - public to all users - list the names of all sources that use the label, including private sources. Also, these label pages show example image 'patches' (small thumbnail cut-outs of a larger image) of point annotations using that label. These patches can come from any source using the label, but if a particular patch is from a private source, the name of the patch's source will not be given.

  • Only members of the source (invited with View, Edit, or Admin permissions) can browse all of the source's data, including full images and their annotations. Other users will be unable to browse pages and images within the source, even if they know the URLs.

User privacy

  • Your username (handle) is public on CoralNet through the list of profiles.

  • You may choose to make your user profile (including first name, last name, and affiliation) public for everyone, public for registered users only, or private.

  • The email address associated with your account is not publicly viewable.

  • We'll never ask you for your password. If you get an email asking you for your password, it didn't come from us.

  • The CoralNet website uses cookies for login and for analytics (via Google).

Changes to this Privacy Policy

Changes from July 2025 onward can be found here.

Prior to July 2025, the privacy policy was instead known as the "data policy" and was just one section of the About page. Therefore, there isn't a particularly clean change-log view for the data policy from this period. However, to view changes to the About page as a whole prior to July 2025, go here; each change may or may not include changes to the data policy section.

Changes take effect on the date of the subsequent production update. Changes from July 2025 onward will be announced on the Google Group and/or CoralNet's blog.