PRIVACY POLICY

 

Who we are

The SenseMyCity platform is owned and operated by ECE scientists from Instituto de Telecomunicações and FEUP, Porto. See the Team page for more information on us.

This privacy policy regards to the websites and mobile apps of the platform, namely:

 

What data is collected?

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

 

Contact forms

If you submit a contact form, the filled data is kept for customer service purposes, but we do not use the information submitted for marketing purposes.

 

Cookies

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save the authentication info and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

No personal information is collected nor tracked via cookies.

 

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

The data access websites use Google’s Open ID for authentication. This service is provided by Google, which may track the user’s IP address and browser agent.

 

Apps

Our apps work in the background 24/7, sporadically analyzing the users movement with a negligibly battery consumption.
This is done by analyzing activity recognition (every 60s) and passive location data requested by other apps, such as Google Services (typically every 20s, if Location history is ON and an internet connection is available).
This analysis requires that a small cache with the last 240s of data be kept on the smartphone memory to be analyzed, but not transmitted.

When movement is detected the app starts a high precision and high frequency data collection, collecting:

  • Location data with the highest precision available (GPS), every 1s;
  • Activity Recognition data (from Google Services), every 60s on average;
  • Wifi and cellular networks and their signal strengths, passively (the app doesn’t actively request, but if other apps do, we also get the data).

Besides these, the answers to the informed consent and questionnaires are also collected.

All data collected by our app is transmitted to our cloud server.

 

How we protect your data

The server is authenticated to the mobile application in order to ensure that it only sends data to the collection server.

The data communication is encrypted using technology similar to that used by browsers for secure connections (SSL): We use public key cryptography (RSA) to exchange a  symmetric session key (AES) randomly generated on each trip.

The server is located in a trustworthy Cloud provider in EU territory, under contract with FEUP, subject to standard measures of protection of information systems.

 

Is the data anonymized?

Each user is identified in the database by the hash used by Google Open ID, in order to have access to their own data. These hash are associated with random user identifiers and serve only the purpose of allowing each participant to be able to access their own data. Hashes are not reversible, so it is not possible to obtain directly the participants’ email.

For this reason, the prize winners will be notified directly through the app when it connects to the server to load the data. Therefore, it is only those who continue with the application installed and collecting data that can receive prize notifications.

The raw data is anonymized with a daily user id for later aggregate processing. This adds a level of anonymity that hinders inference attacks by determining participants’ multi-day mobility patterns, making it difficult to identify, for example, places of residence and times of travel for the same person.

 

What we do with your data

As with most research projects, the final goal is to contribute to science in the form of published articles.

To that end, the collected traces of data are typically:

  • Filtered, to remove duplicates and erroneous data;
  • Processed to extract other information possible: mapmatched, estimated fuel consumption, estimate transportation mode used, etc;
  • Aggregated with other trips having similar characteristics (origin-destination, travel mode, etc)
  • Analyzed to extract mobility patterns, connectivity around the city, study the transport sustainability of the campus, and many others. See the previous results page for samples results of this processing.

 

Who we share your data with

The users’ random identifiers and email hashes are never shared, and are only used in the website authentication phase.

The remaining anonymized data can be shared only among the researchers composing the scientific team of the project, and always with the goal to being studied and  processed as previously specified.

The results of the processing of the aggregated and anonymized data may be published in scientific publications, reports and presentations.

No other personal or identifiable information will be made public nor published anywhere, not even in scientific publications.

 

How to access your own data?

At any time, each participant can access their own collected data, and only their own, through the page: https://sensemycity.up.pt/sensemyfeup/.

In this page, the user can view the data in different ways, download his/her trips in text file, or even erase her/his own data.

Thus, each participant has access and control over their data, without intervention of the organizers of the collection.

 

How long we retain your data

The collected data will be erased when they lose their scientific usefulness or at the end of the scientific projects.
Furthermore, the user identifiers (hash) can be removed for old data in order to improve anonymity.

This deletion and anonymization steps are expected to be preformed around 3 to 5 years after the trip’s collection, depending on the ongoing scientific project requirements.

As we do not store the user’s contact information, the data owner’s are not informed when their old data is deleted.

 

How do I leave the study?

To stop collecting data, participants can change the application settings or uninstall it.

To erase their own data, participants should:

  1. Go to the page https://sensemycity.up.pt/sensemyfeup/
  2. Click on Manage Data, visible on the left side down
  3. Select “Delete Session” on the trips you want to delete

If case of any doubt or for other requests, participants should contact the Prof. Ana Aguiar through the email: ana.aguiar@fe.up.pt