YourMorals Privacy Statement

Our goal is to conduct research on moral psychology. We are committed to conducting this research ethically and to protecting your privacy. For example, we will never give out or sell your email address to anyone for any reason.

What we collect

At registration we request that you tell us some information about yourself that will help us to analyze your other responses. We ask you to provide us with an email address because that is a kind of username that people are unlikely to forget. However, you may use any username you like. When you participate in any of our studies you provide responses to questionnaires, or to experiments on moral judgment. We store all of this information on a secure server, protected by a firewall. The file containing your email address and the files containing your responses to the studies are stored separately, and cannot be merged or interpreted by anyone without specialized knowledge of our website.

If you previously submitted your e-mail address and would like to remove it, please contact our webmaster at raviiyer (at) usc (dot) com.

What we will do with your information

To analyze the results of the various studies conducted on YourMorals, we create a merged file that combines the information you gave us at registration with the information you gave us on each study you completed. These merged files are stripped of the only two pieces that could identify you – your email address and the IP address of the computer you used. These merged files are then sent out to the members of the research consortium that runs YourMorals. At times we might send these files out to other researchers, as part of normal scientific courtesy, if they think that the data in these files could help them to answer scientific questions. But we repeat that these files will not contain any information that could lead anyone to identify the people who provided the data. We will carefully guard your privacy. We plan to keep these merged data files for many years. We will write up scientific articles that report the results of our studies by reporting the averages and other statistics computed across many people’s data. In the rare cases that we report a quote from text that a participant typed into a text box, we will be certain that such quotes do not reveal the identity of the source.

How we use cookies

We will not place any cookies in your browser without your consent. When cookies are allowed they will only be used to manage each session you have at the web site. The cookies make sure that you and only you are able to view your scores.

Web-related information we collect automatically

Like almost all Web sites, we automatically collect information on all requests for pages from our Web server. We collect the IP address of your Internet connection (which generally does not identify you unless your Internet service provider has assigned you a static IP address), the type of browser you used, what you requested, and what was sent. This helps us understand usage of the Web site and allows us to produce aggregate statistics on usage.

Security of the data we collect

We take reasonable technical, administrative, and physical precautions to keep your information secure. For example, we store your responses in a password-protected database located in a secure data center.

Changes

We retain the right to change this Privacy Statement. If we do, the revised Privacy Statement would apply only prospectively to future data collected. We will post changes to this page in a prompt manner. This statement is effective as of May 5, 2007.