MiTalk.org: Mental Health Issues On Campus

Your Privacy

MiTalk Innovation: Balancing “Your Privacy” with Personalization

The best way to utilize MiTalk is to provide the website as much personal demographic information as you feel comfortable doing so. We know some of you might have an issue providing this information for fear that we will be “tracking” you. We want to assure you we are not using this information for anything other than providing you with the best and most relevant information possible.

You should know that since it’s creation, the MiTalk staff has been partnering with students from across campus to develop this site. In working with students from the very beginning we wanted to make sure that every aspect of MiTalk has been designed with the privacy and security of U-M Students in mind. We do this by:

• Asking you to use your U-M unique name and Kerberos password only to authenticate as affiliated with U-M. You will only need to do this once. Afterwards, you can create a completely new unique name and password — both of which will be encrypted, so even we don’t know who you are!
• The demographic information we ask of you, is just that — race, gender, housing status, etc. We use this information as part of our overall data collection, but only so we can target specific information to you (e.g. How men can be advocates to women around sexual assault; how student leaders can help their organization members cope with crisis.) None of the information we gather contains unique identifiers.

The very existence of this web site depends on us taking an extremely strong stand and over-delivering when it comes to privacy issues.

In regards to privacy and open data, we make the following promises to everyone in who uses MiTalk:

• You can delete your data from MiTalk whenever you want.
• Your information is your information, not ours. Our goal is to help you navigate college life, especially when it comes to your mental health, but in order to recommend and refer appropriate resources, we do need to know a little bit about you. Remember, there is no way to for us to link the information you have given us to you personally, since all identifying information is encrypted.
• We’ll keep all of the data you provide online and accessible for as long as you have an account.
• If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.

Again, some of the demographic information you do provide may be used in aggregate form to answer some general questions we might have about users, i.e. how many students from Ann Arbor are using the site, vs. users at Flint and Dearborn, or what’s the most frequented page. We only do this for the purposes of maintaining accurate statistics, conducting research, and refining the site to help us target and gather specific information that might be helpful to various students. However, all information that somehow “might” identify any individual is removed.

If you have any questions, click here to contact us.

In regards to confidentiality with seeing a counselor at one of the campus counseling centers, click here for more information.