Alan Turing Institute Research Computing Service Personal Data and Privacy Policy

Information about you: how we use it and with whom we share it

In the Terms and Conditions of Access, the service undertakes to observe this Policy.

This policy applies to personal data about users of the Turing’s Research Computing service. It relates to data gathered on the service itself.

The details that you provide on registration are stored in the Turing’s SAFE and will be processed according to the Turing’s SAFE privacy policy.

We will store in the service’s database the personal data you supply to us through the website, when you register as a user of the service and later.

We will also store in the database details of your use of all aspects of the service, including, for example, the amount of processor time and storage space you use, the courses you attend and the queries you send to the helpdesk. This may include some personally identifiable data such as the network addresses you use to connect to the system.

We will use this information to help us manage and administer the service, to review, analyse and audit its performance, security, its patterns of use, and to plan for the future.

This information will be available to appropriate members of the staff who are working on the Turing’s Research Computing Service. They will also be available to the Principal Investigator of your research project and to anyone whom the PI designates as a manager of the project.

Resource usage information will be uploaded to the SAFE where it will be processed according to the SAFE data privacy policy.

Periodically, the service will be examined by auditors acting on behalf of your funders, and they may see your personal data. They will be acting under conditions of professional confidentiality.

We reserve the right to monitor your use of the service, including anything you transmit over the Internet, and any data or software you store on our systems, in order to ensure that you and all the other users are complying with the Terms and Conditions of Access and not breaking the law. We must allow any court or other competent authority to inspect our records of your use of the system, or your data, and to take copies of it, if this is legally required; and we must report your activities to the competent authorities if we know or suspect that you are breaking the law. These are legal obligations for us.

We would not be able to administer the service properly, nor adequately account to our funding bodies for our conduct of this project, without processing your personal data in our database in this way. For this reason, we have to ask you to consent to this policy. This consent is included in the Terms and Conditions of Access.

We may retain the data that we gather on the system for the duration of the Turing’s Research Computing Service. Data that could be used to identify you directly will not be retained longer than two years after the end of the service.

If you have any questions about the treatment of your personal data, please email the Helpdesk at research-computing-support@turing.ac.uk.