Our policies on collection and storage of your data
Financial information
We do not collect or store any financial information from our customers. All financial transactions take place through a trusted third-party payment gateway (PayPal, Stripe, or Square).
Personal information
Ordering our services or viewing the results require registration of an account on the website, including a valid mailing address for delivery of the sampling kit. This information cannot be viewed by any other users except the user and the website administrator. This personal information will never be shared with any third parties. Personal information can be modified or deleted at any time by the user.
Results from analysis of your samples
Our guiding principles at AquaBiomics regarding these data are
(a) The buyer owns the data resulting from analysis of their sample; and
(b) These data only become useful through comparison with other samples.
Our specific policies regarding your data reflect an effort to balance these competing demands.
- Only the user that submitted a sample is authorized to directly view the results from that sample.
- Users are free to share their results without restrictions. You own your data.
- AquaBiomics retains the right to store your results to contribute to ongoing development of our aquarium microbiome database, in order to compare client samples with a broad range of saltwater aquariums.
- To protect the user’s privacy,
a) your data will be stored in our database without user identification.
b) Individual users’ results are not visible to other users. The only visible data are shown in aggregate (e.g. the average abundance of this bacterial family in typical reef tanks).
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.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year. 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 your login information 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.
Who we share your data with
We don’t share your information with anyone. Both your personal information and the results from any of your samples can only be viewed while logged in under your account.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
These data will be maintained indefinitely until either
(a) two years have passed since deletion of the user’s account; or
(b) within 30 days after the user has requested in writing (email) that their information be deleted.
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