Privacy Policy

Introduction

The Freiburg Galaxy Team is aware that the protection of your privacy is important when using our Service. We provide this statement to explain our information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. The amount and type of information received by us depends on how you use our website.

Information collected and use of information

During normal usage of our services we do not auto-collect information that will personally identify you. Our webservers only store information such as the Referrer (where you came to us from), pages that you access, and dates of your visit. We may use this information in anonymised aggregates in order to generate usage statistics and to improve the usefulness of our services. Webserver logs are discarded after 24 hours.

Beyond this, we will only store personal information that you provide to us voluntarily (e.g., datasets uploaded to Galaxy, histories you create, or support requests).

The information required to register with the European Galaxy Sites and all uploaded data is used to offer, operate, secure, maintain, and improve the services provided by the Freiburg Galaxy Team. Username and email address are mandatory for registering with this Service. This information is required to guarantee the legitimate use of the Service, to prevent duplicate registrations abusing our quota system, and to send operational notices.

We may retain an account shell containing your username, email address, and analysis metadata after deletion of user-generated data, as described in our Terms of Service.

You can see all of the information we have stored related to your person. You have the right to correct this information at any time. For the Galaxy Service you may do this by going to https://usegalaxy.eu, clicking on “User” → “Preferences” → “Manage Information”. You also have the right to retract your consent to use personal identifiable information at any time with effect for the future. An email to the address stated below is sufficient. We never use or share the personally identifiable information provided to us in ways unrelated to the ones described above.

Cookies

A cookie is a unique identifier given to a web browser by a web server. Each time the browser requests a page from the server, this identifier is sent back to the server. The provided Galaxy Service uses cookies to identify users/computers in order to maintain user sessions (e.g. to provide/maintain analysis results while you browse the website). Usage of cookies is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information about individual users. The information is also not shared with any third party. Unless you specifically tell us, we will never know who you are, even if we do assign a cookie to your computer. Most browsers are set to automatically accept cookies. If you prefer not to receive cookies, you may set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies or you may also refuse all cookies by turning them off in your browser. However, please be aware that in case your browser does not accept cookies, the functionality of our website might be limited.

We also use community‑hosted monitoring and analytics services:

• Sentry – a error‑tracking service that records anonymized exception data to help us improve stability and fix bugs; no personal identifiers are stored.
• Plausible – a community‑hosted analytics tool that collects only aggregate page‑view metrics (IP is anonymized, no cookies) to understand usage patterns.

Both services respect European data‑protection requirements (GDPR).

Links to Other Websites

This Privacy Statement only covers the Galaxy Service provided by the Freiburg Galaxy Team. Links within this website to other websites are not covered by this statement. Please be aware that linked websites could store information in a way which does not comply with this statement, as soon as these websites are accessed. We cannot accept any responsibility for the collection, processing, use and passing on of information in such cases.

Changes

We reserve the right to amend or correct this Privacy Statement at any time. The revised statement will be posted on the website and will only apply to data collected after the effective date of the revised statement.

How to Contact Us

In case you have any questions or concerns related to this Privacy Statement, please send us an email at contact@usegalaxy.eu.

You can also contact the Data Protection Representative of the University of Freiburg via datenschutzbeauftragter@uni-freiburg.de. If you believe that your legal rights have been infringed, you have the right to lodge a formal complaint with the responsible supervisory authorities, e.g. Baden-Württemberg Data Protection and Information Freedom Commissioner