Privacy rules

The Eco-emo tracker application is developed by IPLESP (Inserm - Sorbonne University) for its research teams or partners, in order to carry out real-time surveys for research projects involving environmental and health variables. Only participants in these surveys can use the application and connect to the service. Once the survey is completed, the surveyors deactivate the participant's phone connection, who can no longer use the service and must uninstall the application.

When the survey starts, the location data is recorded for the duration of this survey. These data have two main objectives: to generate dynamic questionnaires according to the location of the participant, and to establish statistical correlations between the movements of the participants and the environments visited and the behavioral or health variable of interest of the research. All participants sign an information and consent form on the collection of their personal data before each survey. They are fully informed about the GPS data collection and its purposes, as well as all other data collected.

In some surveys, participants are asked to answer questions posed by an audio recording. The answers are then transcribed in the form of written texts, which are then analyzed according to the methods of thematic analysis. Only the research team has access to participants' responses in audio or text form.

In some surveys, participants are asked to answer questions by taking a photo. The photos thus submitted by the participants are absolutely inaccessible outside the research team directly dedicated to the project. Depending on the project, photos are encoded using an analytical grid.

All of the data collected by the Eco-emo tracker application is subject to statistical analysis. Posts based on this data never report data for a particular participant. On the contrary, these publications only present aggregated information produced from all the participants, and do not allow any information of an individual nature to be deduced therefrom.

Personal information about participants is always kept in files separate from the analysis files. Thus, analysts do not have access to information such as the name or address of participants when they manipulate databases.

Participants are systematically informed when they are included in the study that they have the option of accessing the data collected about them or requesting its erasure. Participants have both telephone and electronic contact details of the team to exercise this right.

Each project for collecting and analyzing data from the Eco-emo tracker application is the subject of appropriate regulatory requests, within the research organization concerned and with national regulatory bodies.