Privacy, Data Sharing and Permissions
Wait! What are ReefCloud doing with my data?
Can I keep all my data private in ReefCloud?
Absolutely. You can use ReefCloud and still keep your data private. While we’re all about data sharing at ReefCloud, we understand it’s not always possible to make your reef data available.
To view or change the privacy status of your Project, under “Actions” on the Project list, press the “Edit” icon. Two checkboxes appear at the bottom of the pop out box. Checking “Test” means your project is a test (i.e. the data may be a subset or replicate), while “Private” indicate that only you can see the data.
During the development stage of ReefCloud, our team of tech developers may be able to access and view your Project behind the scenes. This is just to help solve problems and improve your experience.
What if I am happy for others to view some but not all of my data?
It's common that users may not be able to share their most recent monitoring data, but older published data can be made available. Under the “Surveys” tab, individual surveys can be made public or private by clicking on the “Edit” icon and toggling between “true” and “false” on the “Restricted” button.
Selecting “true” means your data are restricted: only you can access it. On the ReefCloud Public Dashboard, a greyed out point will indicate that you have data here, but its not available for people to see.
Selecting “false” means that while your photo data are still private, the location of your sites along some basic summary data on coral cover may appear on the Public Dashboard.
How do I share my Project with colleagues?
Its great to collaborate on Projects! Under the “User” tab on the left hand side, you can grant access to others and assign them permissions. Invite friends and collaborators by entering their email address. If they aren’t yet signed up to ReefCloud, they’ll receive an email invitation.
There are three levels of permissions you can assign your collaborators
“Read” allows users to view the Project, and also export the dataset.
“Write” allows users to upload new data, help with annotations, and edit the details of sites and surveys. Write users can not delete sites or surveys, add new users or delete or edit labelsets.
“Admin” gives full control of the Project. A user with Admin rights can delete or add users, and access all ReefCloud functions.
When adding new users, think carefully about who you are sharing your data with. It may be advisable to set up a data sharing agreement before adding users to your project outside of your organisation.
What does it mean when ReefCloud makes data “public”?
When data are “public”, it mean your Project Name, Project Description and Organisation Name may appear on the ReefCloud public dashboard, along with simple benthic summaries derived from your photo datasets and annotations. This includes the location of your sites, depths, year of your surveys and some basic summary statistics, including hard coral cover summaries. If you do not want your data to appear in this way, you can adjust your Project privacy settings.
Your photos, labelsets and detailed analyses will always be private.
How do I edit the privacy settings of my Project?
Access you list of Projects under the "Project" tab on the left hand side. When you click on the "Actions" button, then "Edit" a pop-up will appear where you can change modify the project code and description. Under "Data Access" there are three options.
Project checkbox option indicates whether in future you would be happy for information and raw data (photos and classifications) in your project to be shared with external parties (such as the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network). This feature is coming soon: sharing detailed Project data is not currently possible (your photos, labelsets and detailed analyses are completely private) so we suggest to keep the box checked Private for now.
Summary Data indicates whether you are happy for summary information and data from your project to contribute to regional and global reporting summaries on the publicly accessible ReefCloud Public Dashboard*. Specifically, this includes
summary information from your Project (i.e., your project name and organisation, locations of your sites, depths, survey dates and the number of surveys)
site-level summary data on percent benthic cover (hard coral, soft coral, macroalgae, turf algae, CCA, cyanobacteria, seagrass, hard substrate, soft sediment, rubble, other invertebrates and other) from your photo analysis that will contribute (along with similar data from other Projects across different geographies) to spatial-scale statistical models who's outputs are displayed as a single integrated data set.
Currently, checking "Public" does not mean your data will automatically appear on the ReefCloud Public Dashboard: it still needs to go through internal QA/QC process and our science team will work with you to check you are comfortable before data contributes to global reporting summaries. *for this to happen, you will first need to map your primary project labelset to a standardised global labelset, using the labelset mapping function.
Make available on public dashboard Checking this box alerts our team that you would like to see your data appear on the ReefCloud Public Dashboard, and we can work with you to make this happen.
Make sure you check out the full Terms of Service here.
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