Your Privacy

The Project PROTECTS Team at the City University of New York (CUNY) will do everything we can to protect the information you provide as part of this study.

Here are some of the steps we will take:

• Information we have about you will be password-protected and kept on an encrypted server. 
   
• Your contact information will be securely stored and will only be available to members of the CUNY study team who may need to contact you.
   
• We will remove your name and other identifying information (like your email address, phone number, or date of birth) from your survey responses and test results and store them separately. A code will be used to link your information to your survey responses and test results. There will be a master list linking the codes to names, and we will limit and keep track of who sees it.
   
• Your data will be used for research purposes only. Study data shared with research collaborators outside of CUNY will not contain information that could be used to identify you. Any collaborators with whom your information is shared are required to protect your information and not attempt to identify you from the study data.
• Any publications or presentations using data from Project PROTECTS will present combined data from the study. You will never be identified by name in any research dissemination resulting from this study.
• The study team will only use your specimens as part of this study for testing related to respiratory infections. No genetic testing will ever be conducted.
• We will tell you if there is a data breach.

You will provide information for the study to us through the Project PROTECTS study site or app, which was developed and is maintained by Vibrent Health, a company that has collaborated with the National Institutes of Health and large academic medical centers on a variety of large health research studies.  

There is a risk to your privacy whenever you use an app or website. In general, there is no additional risk to your privacy if you use any of these technologies as part of Project PROTECTS. However, because the study will be collecting many different types of information from you, there may be additional risk to your privacy in case of a data breach because of the amount of information that the database contains. We believe the chance of this is very small, but it is not zero. The Vibrent Health platform will adhere to the highest levels of cyber security and privacy compliance, including the performance of regular platform security audits, to protect from any malicious hacking attempts. 

You can skip any survey question or test, or stop your participation in the study at any time, for any reason. 

You will be notified in a timely manner about any new information regarding this study that may affect your willingness to participate. You will be notified and asked to provide your consent if the study changes.

Questions, Comments or Concerns:

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the research, you can email the research team: [email protected].