If you weren’t aware of your privacy rights before, the last few months has been a wake-up call to a lot of people – but there is still a long way to go before we all fully take back control of our privacy online. For example, did you know that the average website puts over 20 cookies onto your computer when you first log in? A cookie is a tiny piece of software that tracks what you do online after you’ve logged out of a website. Most computers will have well over 1000 cookies in the background, taking note of other places you visit on the internet.

We just wanted to reassure you, Tupaia doesn’t do that!! In fact, Tupaia doesn’t use any of the tricks that some other software companies do to secretly capture your data and invade your privacy.

Recently, you have probably been receiving a number of emails from software services that store your personal data. This is because the European Union Parliament passed a regulation on data protection and privacy that had implications for any company storing the data of EU citizens. Most tech companies (e.g. Facebook, Google, Apple) are updating their terms of service to comply with these regulations.

We wanted to update you on what this means for Tupaia.

Tupaia does not capture patient-identifiable data, so there are no implications at all for our main service. We do store the data of some of our users however and though very, very few of them are EU citizens, we thought this was a good opportunity to update you on what data we capture and how it is stored.

For every user that can log into Tupaia, we only capture the data that you enter when opening an account. This includes:

  • Your name
  • Email address
  • Contact phone number
  • Employer
  • Position

This data is stored on a secure database and is not shared with anyone else. Your passwords are stored with non-reversible encryption (which means even we can’t see them!).

We are also able to see when you log into the Tupaia MediTrak app or tupaia.org, what actions you perform (usage analytics), and which surveys you have completed.

Finally, Tupaia is able to take photos and track your location – this is only done when completing surveys and we do NOT take photos without first warning you in the app (you need to click ‘take a photo’). We use the location data to track where health facilities are – we do not track your location unless you are completing a survey.

That’s it!

Tupaia does not collect data from other parts of your phone, it cannot see your contacts and the only cookies it uses are to record whether you are logged in to tupaia.org. We do not share user details with anyone (unless you ask us to) and we don’t capture data that we don’t tell you about!

Now get out there and do some surveying!!