Privacy Policy

“Higher education institutions, experiencing their own trust crises, have a duty to protect data privacy beyond consumer standards.”
–Autumm Caines & Erin Glass, Educause Review

In DLINQ, we affirm and aim to advance conversations focused on the importance of data privacy. We take a critical perspective on digital technologies, recognizing that their designs and implementations often embody and exacerbate inequities, and extract data from users for companies’ economic gain. 

DLINQ operates from the perspective that we must approach data privacy with a sense of ethical responsibility, justice, and care for faculty, staff, students, and members of our communities (and, yes, we mean our communities here and around the world). Several DLINQ team members are engaged in a privacy workgroup that is evaluating and making recommendations related to Middlebury’s privacy practices. In addition, we are crafting our own approaches to data privacy that, we hope, can shape privacy practices at our institution and beyond.

DLINQ’s privacy statement*

Your personal data is valuable and important, which is why it is often collected by the digital tools you use in your educational activities. DLINQ’s goal is to provide transparency about how it uses your data and encourages you to ask us any questions you have. DLINQ collects the following data for internal organizational improvement efforts and coordination:

Names, email addresses, and departments of people with whom we work, including people who make inquiries to DLINQ. Those inquiries are collected via Google Forms or through emails to dlinq@ or to individual DLINQ team members.

Information about the type of support/work provided to people and the DLINQ team member(s) involved in the work

RSVPs for DLINQ workshops/events are collected through NEX-Forms, a plug-in on the DLINQ website. This data is not retrievable by NEX-Forms.

DLINQ’s website also collects basic user data (IP address, browser, etc.) in server logs and through Google Analytics dashboards. Analytics data is used by administrators to understand basic traffic patterns and is not shared with any third party. We use this data to analyze effective traffic sources for our website and to improve pages based on how users are using the site. The DLINQ site is hosted on MiddCreate servers, which are administered by Reclaim Hosting. 

DLINQ’s Digital Detox newsletters are sent via MyEmma to subscribers who willingly enroll each year in the program. We collect names, email addresses, and affiliations to Middlebury via MyEmma forms. Those data are used to create the Digital Detox email list. Names of alumni who join the Detox are shared with Middlebury’s Alumni office. Participants in the Digital Detox can manage their subscription preferences and unsubscribe at any time.

We are constantly reviewing and evaluating our approaches to privacy and the tools we use that support or detract from our privacy goals. If you have feedback on this work, please contact dlinq a t middlebury dot edu

*Parts of this Policy are remixed from the work of Autumm Caines and Erin Glass, and the Ethical Ed Tech organization. We were also inspired by Common Sense Media’s extensive privacy policy.