Welcome and thank you for your interest in ESA's Kelvins platform and its services. This Privacy Policy is meant to help you understand what information we collect, why we collect it and how you can update, manage and delete this information. If you decide to register to take part at some of the competitions here on Kelvins, there will be two types of data that we collect: Personal data and submissions.
The minimum personal data needed for this service to work is your
The purpose of collecting this data is the generation of your user account, authentication and the option to contact you. Your email will not be shared to anyone and never shown publicly. Your password is stored encrypted and hashed.
If you decide to take part in our competitions (and we hope you do!) you have to join an already existing team or create one of your own. You can freely choose the names of your teams. The teamname is used to identify you in our leaderboards while your username is used to identify you in our discussion forum.
Once you confirm your team ("freezing"), you will be able to upload files to our servers in the form of submissions. Submissions can take various forms depending on the competition, but are most commonly simple text- or zipfiles. The content of those submissions is not public, but is used to rank your team in our leaderboards. Thus, if your submission is valid, a score will be associated with your teamname and you will be ranked among other teams on the corresponding leaderboards.
You may delete your useraccount at any point you wish by using the corresponding function in your account settings. This will remove all personal information from our servers. Any posts you submitted to our discussion boards will remain but your username will be changed to "anonymous". The content that you submitted and the entries in our leaderboard will also remain and will still be associated with your team. Thus, by submitting to our platform you agree that all its content will be stored and utilized by the European Space Agency (ESA). The rules of the specific competitions will describe, if and how we might make use of your submissions besides ranking.
ESA is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the peaceful exploration of space. We hope that Kelvins can help generate new scientific insights that will help us to work towards this goal. Thus, our interest is purely academic. In other words: we are no company that is making money with your personal data. We want you to feel safe in using our services and value your privacy. ESA does not consider your personal data as an asset for sale and, thus, does not sell your personal data to any third parties. We will not disclose any of your personal data.
This summarizes the keypoints, but in the following we provide more detailed information to be compliant with best data protection policies as established by the EU. If you have still questions about our Privacy Policy, feel free to contact us!
1. Who is the Data Controller and the Data Protection Officer?
The European Space Agency (ESA) is the sole Data Controller. You may contact ESA's Data Protection Officer by an eMail to dpo"at"esa.int.
2. What kind of personal data about you are collected and further processed?
Upon registration we collect your username, your eMail address and a password.
3. How are your personal data collected or further processed?
Your personal data are collected during registration and by direct interaction with the website, for example by accessing your account settings.
4. Why are your personal data collected or further processed?
Your personal data are collected and further processed in order to
The organizers of this platform may also send you messages based on your activities on our services, for example your interaction with particular challenges or services provided by our website.
5. To whom might we disclose your personal data?
We do not disclose your personal data without your explicit consent to any third parties. Before posting sensitive information in our discussions boards, please consider that all our discussion boards are publicly visible to anyone with access to the internet.
6. How long do we retain your personal data for?
We retain your personal data as long as we provide Kelvins as a service.
7. How can you erase, rectify, complete or amend your personal data?
You can access your account settings using the following link https://kelvins.esa.int/users/profile/ or by clicking on your username in the top right of the websites navigation bar. A further click on "My profile" will allow you access your account settings. Clicking the corresponding buttons will allow you to change your eMail or password accordingly. To the lower right you will a button that enables you to irrevocably erase your complete account. Content in form of submission files will remain on the platform. If you did take part in a competition as a teammember, the leaderboard will still contain its teamname and the associated scores. Your posts in our discussion boards will remain, but your username will be changed to "anonymous".
8. What could you do in case of a data protection incident?
You should contact the data protection officer (DPO) by sending an eMail to dpo"at"esa.int. In case you wish to submit a complaint, you will be required to demonstrate that a data protection incident occured in relation to your personal data, following a decision of the organizers of this platform or at least to justify serious reasons to believe that such incident occurred.
9. Your Consent
For those cases where your consent was not already obtained by ESA (including by other modalities) and is required under the ESA Framework on Personal Data Protection, you agree with the collection and further processing of your personal data. You will be able to withdraw your consent depending on the modality used to collect your personal data by erasing your account (please note that content like your submissions remain on the platform without a possibility to recover the connection at a later stage or by a new registration).