Privacy Policy

We require registration for the data viewer portion of our site so that we can contact you to resolve problems with excessive or abnormal usage patterns. (Mostly, it's to avoid getting hammered by bots. But maybe you were planning to write a bot and give it a hammer! In which case, yeah, we would want to get in touch with you about that)

We retain your email address if you have signed up for an account in the data viewer.

Any additional personal information you provide to us, such as through an outreach event or user survey, is voluntary, and does not affect the features available to you through the data viewer.

We log information about your use of the data viewer, including the user id, table name, and other parameters of each request. We retain these logs for a period of not longer than five years. We use this information for the following purposes:

  • to monitor the responsiveness of the data viewer
  • to recommend to you features relevant to your use of the service
  • to inform feature planning and development
  • to identify excessive or abnormal usage patterns which may harm our system

These logs are available to all members and member candidates at Catalyst, and are expunged at or before they reach five years in age.

By default, we will only use your email address to contact you in the following scenarios:

  • account verification
  • your usage of the data viewer becomes excessive or abnormal
  • we discover a data breach in our systems (and you should retire your password)
  • updates to this privacy policy

If and only if you consent, we will also use your email address for:

  • voluntary user outreach events or user surveys for the general community
  • voluntary user outreach based on your specific usage
  • newsletters or other mailing list traffic specifically requested by you
  • retrieving or deleting your data in our systems, at your request

We store the mapping from email addresses to user ids in a location separate from server logs, using security measures consistent with our internal information security practices to help us keep your information secure.

Individual usage records are only ever accessible to members and member candidates at Catalyst. We will never sell or share your individual user data of any kind to third parties without your explicit consent.

We may share deidentified, aggregate data in funding proposals and publications. Mostly to brag. Sometimes to convince someone they should let us solve a problem in the energy data domain. We will use best practices in statistical reporting to ensure data cannot be reidentified.

For a copy of your data, or to request your data be deleted from our systems, email [email protected] with subject line "PII Data Request".

Our sites link to external services such as AWS S3, Zenodo, GitHub, and Kaggle. Catalyst retrieves traffic logs from those services, but does not link them to your email or user id. Your use of external services is governed by those services and not by Catalyst; we cannot delete records of your use of those services.

If we need to update this privacy policy for any reason, we will give you at least one week’s notice via the email we have on file.

For more information, contact [email protected].