Hearty Carrot is an experimental platform for studying the design of healthy-eating apps. GroupLens Research, a research lab at the University of Minnesota, has created this privacy statement to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this service.
If you have specific concerns, please feel free to contact us (heartycarrotapp@gmail.com) and we will see what we can do.
To accomplish our research, we need to monitor how people use Hearty Carrot. This includes recording when each user logs in, what screens the user views, and what foods the user logs, among others. We represent users anonymously as numeric identifiers whenever possible, so that researchers do not know the real identity of the users in the data they are studying. However, we must store a mapping from email addresses to anonymous identifiers for the purpose of authenticating users at login, and resolving account issues.
When you register to use Hearty Carrot, we ask you to authenticate with Google, who then provides us with your email address, real name, and avatar image, among others. Using this means of authentication allows you to easily log in, and allows you to grant or revoke access to your information using Google’s services.
We use a cloud database (Google Firebase) to store your email address, as well as the information you provide to us using the app (e.g., food logs) and the “server logging” information described above. Only the key research staff associated with this project have direct access to these data.
We will not release your email address or name to any third parties. We may share your demographic data (without your name or email address attached) in research results. Furthermore, we may refer to the logs of individual users (without your name or email address attached) in research results.
Members of the research group are made aware of our privacy policy and practices by reviewing this statement upon joining the team.
This privacy statement is reviewed as needed and was last revised April 24, 2019.